Re: [Wikimedia-l] Promotion of scientific racism in Wikipedia articles

[John Erling Blad]

Feel free to explain how the appearance of race differences is not defined
by genetics. I have absolutely no problem accepting that people are
different, and that some people may even be better adapted to
the environment than me. ;)

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 3:32 PM Fæ  wrote:

> No, we do not call other Wikipedians "Negroid" because of their
> appearance meeting a racist theory published in the 1930s.
>
> Or were you trying to say something else, other than defending
> "scientific racism" on this public list?
>
> Fae
>
> On Tue, 16 Jun 2020 at 14:25, John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > I'm not sure it is wise to try to refute differences between humans,
> > whether we call it race or something else, it is simply too easy to point
> > out the differences. We should rather promote that differences are a
> > GoodThing™
> >
> > Humans do exhibit racial differences, but those differences should not be
> > used as an excuse for abusing other people.
> >
> > I'm a pink Norwegian, and I would probably die in the Kalahari desert,
> > unless rescued by someone from the San people. They are so darn cool!
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 2:57 PM Fæ  wrote:
> >
> > > It is remarkably easy to find various language Wikipedia articles that
> > > actively promote scientific racism. The forthcoming WMF universal code
> > > of conduct is unlikely to directly address this type of damaging
> > > anti-educational content, or require projects to take action.
> > >
> > > This may surprise some, but here are two examples, and if you follow
> > > the multiple language links in each, you will find many other language
> > > examples:
> > >
> > > [1] Wikipedia article in Russian about "Negroid race" (Негроидная
> > > раса) and associates Negroid as being defined by genetics. Nowhere in
> > > the article is it explained that these are debunked racist theories.
> > >
> > > [2] Wikipedia article in Italian about "Mongoloid" (Mongoloide),
> > > defines being Mongoloid by physical characteristics and presents it as
> > > a scientific term with a section explaining how the Mogoloid race is
> > > geographically spread.
> > >
> > > Unfortunately, as these outdated racist theories are Wikipedia
> > > articles, Wikimedia Commons still hosts multiple *user created*
> > > "racial maps" of the human race as if this were a current scientific
> > > race taxonomy for humans. These maps are not even required to have
> > > warnings that their content is scientific racism or why that's a bad
> > > thing.[3]
> > >
> > > At the current time, nobody is solving this problem with systemic
> > > racism and I am unaware of the WMF funding a project that will take
> > > action to fix it, nor even tracking this repugnant material. The idea
> > > that we might still be vaguely talking about how bad it is that
> > > Wikipedia is being used to promote "Negroid race" as science in
> > > several years time, without any systematic action to get rid of it or
> > > at least correctly reformat the article to describe it as debunked,
> > > should alarm everyone concerned that donor's money is supporting this
> > > content.
> > >
> > > Links
> > > 1.
> > >
> https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B0
> > > 2. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoloide
> > > 3.
> > >
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Average_East-Eurasian_ancestry_(Mongoloid).png
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Fae
> > > --
> > > fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
> > >
> > > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Promotion of scientific racism in Wikipedia articles

[John Erling Blad]

I'm not sure it is wise to try to refute differences between humans,
whether we call it race or something else, it is simply too easy to point
out the differences. We should rather promote that differences are a
GoodThing™

Humans do exhibit racial differences, but those differences should not be
used as an excuse for abusing other people.

I'm a pink Norwegian, and I would probably die in the Kalahari desert,
unless rescued by someone from the San people. They are so darn cool!

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 2:57 PM Fæ  wrote:

> It is remarkably easy to find various language Wikipedia articles that
> actively promote scientific racism. The forthcoming WMF universal code
> of conduct is unlikely to directly address this type of damaging
> anti-educational content, or require projects to take action.
>
> This may surprise some, but here are two examples, and if you follow
> the multiple language links in each, you will find many other language
> examples:
>
> [1] Wikipedia article in Russian about "Negroid race" (Негроидная
> раса) and associates Negroid as being defined by genetics. Nowhere in
> the article is it explained that these are debunked racist theories.
>
> [2] Wikipedia article in Italian about "Mongoloid" (Mongoloide),
> defines being Mongoloid by physical characteristics and presents it as
> a scientific term with a section explaining how the Mogoloid race is
> geographically spread.
>
> Unfortunately, as these outdated racist theories are Wikipedia
> articles, Wikimedia Commons still hosts multiple *user created*
> "racial maps" of the human race as if this were a current scientific
> race taxonomy for humans. These maps are not even required to have
> warnings that their content is scientific racism or why that's a bad
> thing.[3]
>
> At the current time, nobody is solving this problem with systemic
> racism and I am unaware of the WMF funding a project that will take
> action to fix it, nor even tracking this repugnant material. The idea
> that we might still be vaguely talking about how bad it is that
> Wikipedia is being used to promote "Negroid race" as science in
> several years time, without any systematic action to get rid of it or
> at least correctly reformat the article to describe it as debunked,
> should alarm everyone concerned that donor's money is supporting this
> content.
>
> Links
> 1.
> https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B0
> 2. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoloide
> 3.
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Average_East-Eurasian_ancestry_(Mongoloid).png
>
> Thanks,
> Fae
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Annoying ads

[John Erling Blad]

It happen after a reboot where the browsers was reset.
No, I did not take a screenshot.

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 7:43 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> >
> > This is a complaint about multiple banners on the same page.
>
>
>
> > I believe it would be better to put the add on the lower part of the
> > viewport, for all users, and for a limited time. Posting ads at random
> > locations
>
>
> I couldn't figure out how to experience this feature -- can you share a
> screenshot?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Annoying ads

[John Erling Blad]

One of the browsers are set up with forced session cookies and web storage,
and also to block third parties. It breaks several features, also central
login. I have reported it as an issue, but none has bothered to create a
fix.

I believe it would be better to put the add on the lower part of the
viewport, for all users, and for a limited time. Posting ads at random
locations and disrupting (terrorizing) the readers is not a good idea.

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 12:04 AM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> >
> > If you're browsing in a private-window, this means the browser cannot
> > remember (save in a cookie) that you clicked "close" or saw the banner
> > already, hence you might be seeing more banners than most readers would.
> >
>
> Worth mentioning each time it comes up:
> This seems like an instance of where tracking interactions w/ a given {IP,
> day} or {hash of browser fingerprint+IP+daily salt} would vastly outweigh
> the challenges.  We can support private browsing, or any kind of browsing,
> without creating a painful experience [which is also... not likely to
> result in a donation].
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Annoying ads

[John Erling Blad]

Thanks, but I do know how to log in at Wikipedia, its about 15 years since
I started editing.

This is a complaint about multiple banners on the same page.

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 11:02 PM Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <
nwil...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi John, thank you for the feedback.
>
> The banners you see are continually changing, as we refine our designs
> based on feedback and efficacy. Donation banners are inherently disruptive,
> on any site. We try to minimize the annoyance whilst also maximizing the
> effectiveness in order to show as few banners as possible. It's a difficult
> balance, and feedback like yours, and the emails and comments we get from
> readers, help us out over time.
>
> If you don’t want to see fundraising banners, there are a few options: You
> can login to Wikipedia, or click the "close" button in a banner, or visit
> our donor thank you page.[1]
>
> If you're browsing in a private-window, this means the browser cannot
> remember (save in a cookie) that you clicked "close" or saw the banner
> already, hence you might be seeing more banners than most readers would.
>
> Thanks again,
> Nick
>
> [1] https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Thank_You
>
> On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 7:56 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Often I surf Wikipedia without being logged in, and so I did right now. I
> > got the usual banners, but this time they popped up repeatedly in several
> > locations. This quickly gets extremely annoying, and I find it unwise.
> > Create one banner, and stick with that. Several banners are simply way
> over
> > the top.
> >
> > /jeblad
> > ___
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>
>
>
> --
> Nick "Quiddity" Wilson (he/him)
> Community Relations Specialist
> Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Annoying ads

[John Erling Blad]

I am nearly always logged in, but I also quite frequently open browser
windows where I am not logged in. It might have something to do with who I
am and what I do.

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 5:27 PM Robert Fernandez 
wrote:

> I know this might sound crazy, but have you considered logging in?
>
> On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 10:56 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Often I surf Wikipedia without being logged in, and so I did right now. I
> > got the usual banners, but this time they popped up repeatedly in several
> > locations. This quickly gets extremely annoying, and I find it unwise.
> > Create one banner, and stick with that. Several banners are simply way
> over
> > the top.
> >
> > /jeblad
> > ___
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[Wikimedia-l] Annoying ads

[John Erling Blad]

Often I surf Wikipedia without being logged in, and so I did right now. I
got the usual banners, but this time they popped up repeatedly in several
locations. This quickly gets extremely annoying, and I find it unwise.
Create one banner, and stick with that. Several banners are simply way over
the top.

/jeblad
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[Wikimedia-l] Is the Wikimedia-movement apolitical?

[John Erling Blad]

It is said quite often that the Wikimedia-movement is apolitical. In
strongly believe the movement with its goal has never been, and never will
be apolitical. When we say that knowledge should be free and fully
available for everyone, then we make a political statement. It may not
align with you favorite love/hate political party, but it is still a very
strong political statement.

So please, don't claim the movement to be apolitical. We may not align with
any specific political party in any specific country, but we are still not
apolitical.

/jeblad
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF political activism

[John Erling Blad]

Can everyone please calm down.
This is (nearly) only hyperbole.

Thank you.

/jeblad

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 8:51 AM Fæ  wrote:

> OPEN LETTER
>
> Dear Katherine Maher,
>
> The WMF home website landing page (https://wikimediafoundation.org)
> yesterday featured a full-page banner directing all visitors globally
> to https://www.earthdaylive2020.org. This is a site used for Americal
> political lobbying, refer to the email discussion attached.
>
> Could you, or the responsible member of your management team, please
> explain exactly how this happened?
>
> There is zero doubt that this was a serious operational error, misuse
> of WMF development time and a misuse of the Wikimedia brand. It is
> certain that you will agree that the buck stops with the CEO. The
> decision to use the Foundation's website for American lobbying is in
> conflict with your not for profit status and is in conflict with the
> charitable status promoted to donors worldwide.
>
> If the management team and yourself are going to continuing political
> lobbying and using WMF resources to raise funds for Americal political
> organizations which have no agreed relevance to the mission of the
> Foundation, there must be a published transparent governance review by
> the WMF board of trustees to examine and agree on this significant
> operational change to the public Foundation strategy and the terms for
> the CEO.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> Link to Phabricator task to implement the banner:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T250508
> CC: María Sefidari as WMF Chair.
>
> Fae
>
> On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 at 05:50, K. Peachey  wrote:
> >
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T250508
> >
> > On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 at 09:53, Chris Gates via Wikimedia-l
> >  wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > It seems that they just gave a link to that website, which...eh...
> > > When I opened it, I heard one sentence of the stream before I stopped
> it
> > > and read the rest of the webpage: "and then we give thanks to spirit,
> for
> > > the air we breathe, for the earth..." After reading the rest of the
> > > webpage, I un-paused it, and am currently listening to a bit of
> propaganda
> > > promoting unions and more extensive labor laws.
> > >
> > > The linked website is explicitly political, explicitly  on the American
> > > left, and explicitly in favor of certain highly contentious American
> > > political proposals. I would like to hear the reasoning for why that
> link
> > > has been shown, and it seems to me simply unjustifiable. The WMF is the
> > > host of a series of community-built projects, not a political activism
> > > organization.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Vermont
> > >
> > > On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 5:12 PM Ziko van Dijk 
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hello,
> > > > I can confirm that I see the same also here in the Netherlands.
> Which is
> > > > strange, there are no general elections here before 2021...
> > > > An explanation about this link would be interesting.
> > > > Kind regards
> > > > Ziko
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Am Mi., 22. Apr. 2020 um 22:50 Uhr schrieb Yair Rand <
> yyairr...@gmail.com
> > > > >:
> > > >
> > > > > The WMF corporate site (wikimediafoundation.org) currently has a
> > > > > full-page ad with the text "We are watching Earth Day Live today.
> Will
> > > > > you?". This links to an external site with the text "Click here to
> sign
> > > > on
> > > > > to the US Youth Climate Strike Coalition Earth Day Demands - From
> > > > congress
> > > > > and the next president, we demand a People’s Bailout, a Green New
> Deal,
> > > > and
> > > > > Land Back for Indigenous Peoples", and prompting readers to
> "Pledge to
> > > > vote
> > > > > for our future" and to subscribe to "US Climate Strike".
> > > > >
> > > > > Everyone here already knows how unacceptable this is, and why, so
> I don't
> > > > > think this requires any further explanation. The WMF should
> immediately
> > > > > take this down, and make certain that this kind of thing can't
> happen
> > > > > again. They've failed yet again at preventing inappropriate
> > > > > political activism in WMF's communications, and must take serious
> action
> > > > to
> > > > > fix this constant stream of terrible failures.
> > > > >
> > > > > -- Yair Rand
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Brand Project: Who are we as a movement?

[John Erling Blad]

This is a reply Shamir, but it is more a reply to the process and Wikimedia
Foundation.

Reading [1] my immediate thought is that whoever wrote it is more focused
on reputing the core finding than respecting the outcome. It is a reaction
to the statement “We do not know what the Wikimedia Foundation’s new name
would be, only that it would utilize Wikipedia not Wikimedia.” and 91% says
“no”. Still the process continues as nothing has happen. When 91% opposes a
change in volunteer organization you stop and listen, this is an earthquake.

I opposed the name change, even if I don't really agree with the RFC, but
what happen later I find perhaps more troublesome. This shows a real lack
of understanding of why people objected to the idea. People have said no to
this several times now, and the process continues like nothing has happen.
Someone must clarify what this is, and who is behind it, and why, because
as it is now the chance of onboarding the communities are virtually zero.

As it is now I would say call it a failure, and make a full halt.

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project/RfC_Should_the_Foundation_call_itself_Wikipedia

John Erling Blad
/jeblad

On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 10:49 AM Samir Elsharbaty 
wrote:

> Hi, the Brand team has been watching the RfC and has written a summary
> about it [1] that was shared both in the RfC [2] and the project page [3]
> in Meta. The team has integrated the feedback of the RfC in the development
> process, just as we did with the activities organized by the project
> itself.
>
> The RfC is covered in the main project page as well as in the FAQ [4]. The
> RfC has been a recurrent topic of discussion in the Brand project talk page
> [5], where we are answering questions and discussing topics whenever they
> are posted. We recommend you to have a look at these updates before making
> further conclusions here.
>
> The RfC is about the use of the word “Wikipedia” in the name of the
> Foundation, and by extension the names of affiliates were discussed as
> well. The project team has clarified that many options for a naming
> convention are being explored. While having Wikipedia as a central concept
> is a project requirement, It is very unlikely that any naming convention
> proposal will be based on a simple substitution of the word "Wikimedia"
> with the word "Wikipedia". Brand systems offer many more possibilities.
>
> Another important point to clarify is that the proposals for naming
> conventions haven’t been defined yet. According to the project timeline
> [6], several proposals for a naming convention will be shared with the
> communities for feedback in May, at the earliest. At the end of this
> review, one proposal will be selected and refined. You can check the
> timeline to learn about further phases with public reviews before the full
> proposal for a brand system is presented to the Wikimedia Foundation
> leadership and the Board.
>
> [1]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project/RfC_Should_the_Foundation_call_itself_Wikipedia
>
> [2]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Should_the_Foundation_call_itself_Wikipedia#Report_about_this_RfC_by_the_Brand_Project_team
>
> [3]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project
>
> [4]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project/FAQ
>
> [5]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project
>
>
>
>
> Samir Elsharbaty (he/him)
>
> Community Brand and Marketing coordinator
>
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 1:12 AM David Gerard  wrote:
>
> > Yes. Who's the person telling Samir to post this stuff, which comes
> > across as aggressively ignoring all feedback to date? Could we have a
> > word with them here?
> >
> >
> > - d.
> >
> > On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 14:12, Peter Southwood
> >  wrote:
> > >
> > > When you speak for someone who is hard of listening, it is an
> > occupational hazard that you will be shouted at occasionally by those
> whose
> > voices are being ignored. It is not necessarily anything personal, just
> > part of the heat in the kitchen.
> > > Cheers,
> > > Peter
> > >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter
> > > Sent: Friday, April 10, 2020 11:28 AM
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > Subject: R

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Face recognition

[John Erling Blad]

Training sets already contain images from Commons, so yes, I believe
the implications should be considered.

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 4:46 PM Newyorkbrad  wrote:
>
> This whole subject raises interesting and important legal and ethical
> issues, but are there any direct implications at this time for
> Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects?
>
> Newyorkbrad/IBM
>
>
>
> On Sunday, January 19, 2020, Ryan Merkley  wrote:
>
> > I don't believe it implies that. As with many things legal, the answer re:
> > derivatives is likely "it depends".
> >
> > R.
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:30 PM Benjamin Ikuta 
> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > Thanks for that.
> > >
> > > Pardon me if I've missed something, but that seems to imply, but not
> > > directly state, that AI training is a derivative work; could you clarify
> > > that?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Jan 18, 2020, at 2:58 PM, Ryan Merkley 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > [My comments are my own, and don’t reflect or suggest any official
> > > position from WMF]
> > > >
> > > > The NBC story linked below come out about a year ago. Around the same
> > > time, when I was CEO at Creative Commons, we published a statement and
> > > updated FAQs that attempted to respond to questions being asked about
> > > permitted uses and attribution related to the licenses.
> > > >
> > > > CC’s statement (March 2019) is here:
> > > https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-
> > shared-images-in-facial-recognition-ai/
> > > <
> > > https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-
> > shared-images-in-facial-recognition-ai/
> > > >
> > > > The FAQs are here:
> > > https://creativecommons.org/faq/#artificial-intelligence-and-cc-licenses
> > <
> > > https://creativecommons.org/faq/#artificial-intelligence-and-cc-licenses
> > >
> > > >
> > > > r.
> > > >
> > > > _
> > > >
> > > > Ryan Merkley (he/him)
> > > > Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/
> > >
> > > >
> > > > rmerk...@wikimedia.org <mailto:rmerk...@wikimedia.org>
> > > > @ryanmerkley <https://twitter.com/ryanmerkley>
> > > > +1 416 802 0662
> > > >
> > > >> On Jan 18, 2020, at 2:14 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >> There are several reports of face recognition going mainstream, often
> > > >> in less than optimum circumstances, and often violating copyright and
> > > >> licenses
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-
> > privacy-facial-recognition.html
> > > >>
> > > https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-
> > dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921
> > > >> https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/01/diversity-in-faces/
> > > >>
> > > >> In my opinion building a model for face recognition is a derived work,
> > > >> and as such must credit the photographers. That pose a real problem
> > > >> when the photographers counts in the millions and billions. Even a 1px
> > > >> fine print would be troublesome!
> > > >>
> > > >> What is the official stance on this? Is it a copyright infringement or
> > > >> not, does the license(s) cover the case or not?
> > > >>
> > > >> John Erling Blad
> > > >> /jeblad
> > > >>
> > > >> ___
> > > >> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > >> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> > ,
> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> > > >
> > > > ___
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> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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> > > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@li

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Face recognition

[John Erling Blad]

From my background in neural networks, and my understanding of how
they work, I would say that your trained network is a derived work if
the weights are learned from a specific training sample. If it does
not learn from a specific sample it is not a derived work from that
sample. It is not sufficient that a specific image is in a training
batch, it must also trigger learning.

The goal for the training is partial or full reconstruction of
properties necessary for some operation. It is perhaps easier to see
with an example: Imagine you have photos of Picasso's art, and you try
to estimate whether some art is within his Blue Period. Is the network
derived work from Picasso's art? And how does that compare to whether
the network itself is a work of art, is it still derived from another
(set of) work of art?

I would say training of neural networks is a derived work built on the
training samples, but I would not say itself is a derived work of art,
even if it can be copyrighted.

The most common solution these days seems to be to encode what is
called "eigenfaces", and then use those to create a kind of hashes for
similarity detection. Eigenfaces are a kind of arketypes of how a face
look like, and mixing such faces creates new ones. It is a bit similar
to those flipover albums the police uses, but allowing a lot more of
gradual changes. Face detection is often visualized as vector points
in movies, but this is not how eigenfaces work. Or rather, it creates
vectors, but not as dots on a portrait.

Note that ClearviewAI goes a good bit longer than just learn some
variant of eigenfaces.

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 4:30 AM Benjamin Ikuta  wrote:
>
>
>
> Thanks for that.
>
> Pardon me if I've missed something, but that seems to imply, but not directly 
> state, that AI training is a derivative work; could you clarify that?
>
>
>
> On Jan 18, 2020, at 2:58 PM, Ryan Merkley  wrote:
>
> > [My comments are my own, and don’t reflect or suggest any official position 
> > from WMF]
> >
> > The NBC story linked below come out about a year ago. Around the same time, 
> > when I was CEO at Creative Commons, we published a statement and updated 
> > FAQs that attempted to respond to questions being asked about permitted 
> > uses and attribution related to the licenses.
> >
> > CC’s statement (March 2019) is here: 
> > https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-shared-images-in-facial-recognition-ai/
> >  
> > <https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-shared-images-in-facial-recognition-ai/>
> > The FAQs are here: 
> > https://creativecommons.org/faq/#artificial-intelligence-and-cc-licenses 
> > <https://creativecommons.org/faq/#artificial-intelligence-and-cc-licenses>
> >
> > r.
> >
> > _
> >
> > Ryan Merkley (he/him)
> > Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
> >
> > rmerk...@wikimedia.org <mailto:rmerk...@wikimedia.org>
> > @ryanmerkley <https://twitter.com/ryanmerkley>
> > +1 416 802 0662
> >
> >> On Jan 18, 2020, at 2:14 PM, John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >>
> >> There are several reports of face recognition going mainstream, often
> >> in less than optimum circumstances, and often violating copyright and
> >> licenses
> >>
> >> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
> >> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921
> >> https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/01/diversity-in-faces/
> >>
> >> In my opinion building a model for face recognition is a derived work,
> >> and as such must credit the photographers. That pose a real problem
> >> when the photographers counts in the millions and billions. Even a 1px
> >> fine print would be troublesome!
> >>
> >> What is the official stance on this? Is it a copyright infringement or
> >> not, does the license(s) cover the case or not?
> >>
> >> John Erling Blad
> >> /jeblad
> >>
> >> ___
> >> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
> >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
> >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> >> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
> >> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Face recognition

[John Erling Blad]

People on another forum says portraits are personal data and use of
them is a breach of Art. 6 GDPR Lawfulness of processing. This creates
a problem in most European countries. This is a breach of privacy
laws, and not a copyright issue.[1]

Not sure how to interpret the local copyright law on this. It can be
read both as it is legal (even to just repurpose all kind of images no
matter license) and as it is illegal to do it (it would be similar to
sampling of previously published music). Seems like you are allowed to
train a model, but you can't publish it…

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 11:58 PM Ryan Merkley  wrote:
>
> [My comments are my own, and don’t reflect or suggest any official position 
> from WMF]
>
> The NBC story linked below come out about a year ago. Around the same time, 
> when I was CEO at Creative Commons, we published a statement and updated FAQs 
> that attempted to respond to questions being asked about permitted uses and 
> attribution related to the licenses.
>
> CC’s statement (March 2019) is here: 
> https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-shared-images-in-facial-recognition-ai/
>  
> <https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-shared-images-in-facial-recognition-ai/>
> The FAQs are here: 
> https://creativecommons.org/faq/#artificial-intelligence-and-cc-licenses 
> <https://creativecommons.org/faq/#artificial-intelligence-and-cc-licenses>
>
> r.
>
> _
>
> Ryan Merkley (he/him)
> Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>
> rmerk...@wikimedia.org <mailto:rmerk...@wikimedia.org>
> @ryanmerkley <https://twitter.com/ryanmerkley>
> +1 416 802 0662
>
> > On Jan 18, 2020, at 2:14 PM, John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > There are several reports of face recognition going mainstream, often
> > in less than optimum circumstances, and often violating copyright and
> > licenses
> >
> > https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
> > https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921
> > https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/01/diversity-in-faces/
> >
> > In my opinion building a model for face recognition is a derived work,
> > and as such must credit the photographers. That pose a real problem
> > when the photographers counts in the millions and billions. Even a 1px
> > fine print would be troublesome!
> >
> > What is the official stance on this? Is it a copyright infringement or
> > not, does the license(s) cover the case or not?
> >
> > John Erling Blad
> > /jeblad
> >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
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>
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[Wikimedia-l] Face recognition

[John Erling Blad]

There are several reports of face recognition going mainstream, often
in less than optimum circumstances, and often violating copyright and
licenses

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/01/diversity-in-faces/

In my opinion building a model for face recognition is a derived work,
and as such must credit the photographers. That pose a real problem
when the photographers counts in the millions and billions. Even a 1px
fine print would be troublesome!

What is the official stance on this? Is it a copyright infringement or
not, does the license(s) cover the case or not?

John Erling Blad
/jeblad

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Snøhetta and Wikimedia

[John Erling Blad]

… and people immediately went ballistic. Calm down and discuss the topic!

The news reporting seems to be that Snøhetta has been awarded a full
design project, while the page at Meta says it should act as some form
of facilitator. It could be interesting to know what is correct, as
these two descriptions are pretty disparate.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Snøhetta and Wikimedia

[John Erling Blad]

Note that "Dagens næringsliv" printed the story Thursday, so they must
have had information about it before WMF left the meeting with
Snøhetta. This is no longer a breaking story.

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 12:04 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> This is out in several newspapers now.
>
> "Snøhetta shall create new visual profile for Wikipedia-owner" [1]
>
> A quick Google Translate dump
>
> The mission is the largest in the field of graphic design ever, writes
> Dagens Næringsliv.
>
> - For me personally, this is very big, but you see it in a larger
> perspective - Norway, Norwegian design and graphic design - then this
> is one of the largest international customers who have come to Norway
> and chosen a Norwegian design agency. So it's very big, says strategic
> advisor Sanda Zahirovic in the design department in Snøhetta to the
> newspaper.
>
> Eight companies were in the competition for the assignment. Creative
> director Heather Walls at Wikimedia will not go out with Dagens
> Næringsliv with what other companies were talking about, but says that
> Snøhetta was the obvious choice.
>
> Snow hood founder and partner Kjetil Trædal Thorsen cannot say how
> much the contract is worth, but emphasizes that the work is devoting a
> good deal of resources during the project period, which is half a
> year.
>
> [1] 
> https://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/i/mRd1pp/snoehetta-skal-skape-en-ny-visuell-profil-for-wikipedia-eier

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[Wikimedia-l] Snøhetta and Wikimedia

[John Erling Blad]

This is out in several newspapers now.

"Snøhetta shall create new visual profile for Wikipedia-owner" [1]

A quick Google Translate dump

The mission is the largest in the field of graphic design ever, writes
Dagens Næringsliv.

- For me personally, this is very big, but you see it in a larger
perspective - Norway, Norwegian design and graphic design - then this
is one of the largest international customers who have come to Norway
and chosen a Norwegian design agency. So it's very big, says strategic
advisor Sanda Zahirovic in the design department in Snøhetta to the
newspaper.

Eight companies were in the competition for the assignment. Creative
director Heather Walls at Wikimedia will not go out with Dagens
Næringsliv with what other companies were talking about, but says that
Snøhetta was the obvious choice.

Snow hood founder and partner Kjetil Trædal Thorsen cannot say how
much the contract is worth, but emphasizes that the work is devoting a
good deal of resources during the project period, which is half a
year.

[1] 
https://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/i/mRd1pp/snoehetta-skal-skape-en-ny-visuell-profil-for-wikipedia-eier

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome back, Turkey

[John Erling Blad]

Seems like the site is throttled or even redirected to a taerpit.
Anyone inside Turkey that can run a trace?

On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 7:21 PM Amanda Keton  wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> My name is Amanda Keton, the new General Counsel at the Wikimedia
> Foundation. While Katherine is inflight traveling back from a busy week of
> community meetings in Chile, I wanted to share the exciting news that
> today, we have started to receive reports that the block of Wikipedia in
> Turkey is being lifted, data which is also indicated by our internal
> traffic reports. After more than two and a half years, access to Wikipedia
> has been restored in Turkey - and on a timely occasion, as we celebrate
> Wikipedia’s 19th birthday today!
>
> Please join me in welcoming back our friends and colleagues from Turkey.
> While many have remained active during the block, restoring access to
> Wikipedia will allow thousands more to return in the days and weeks ahead.
> It is our shared responsibility and honor to help make them feel welcome
> again and make sure they know how much we missed them. I am confident that
> our community will successfully welcome them back with open arms. I know we
> have community members around the world who have been eagerly looking
> forward to the block being lifted and brainstorming activities to
> celebrate, and I welcome them to share their ideas as we move forward.
>
> Our case in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is also still
> pending, and remains important even in light of the unblock as a way to
> continue advocating for strong protections for free expression online. We
> will continue to post updates about the next steps in our case before the
> ECHR on the Wikimedia Foundation website. We have also published a
> statement to reflect that access has now been restored in Turkey. [1]
>
> Thank you all for your efforts, kind words, and encouraging thoughts as we
> worked to restore access to Wikipedia in Turkey. I want to thank our
> Turkish community, in particular, for their patience, resolution, and
> continued participation in the movement during the more than two and a half
> years Wikipedia was inaccessible. This was a prolonged global effort, on
> behalf of free knowledge everywhere.
>
> Of course, there are other blocks around the world still in place, and our
> efforts in addressing this type of censorship of knowledge is far from
> over. That said, I hope all of you will celebrate this momentous
> accomplishment for free knowledge today and join me in welcoming back the
> people of Turkey to our projects, movement, and community.
>
> With gratitude,
>
> Amanda
>
> [1]
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/01/16/access-to-wikipedia-restored-in-turkey-after-more-than-two-and-a-half-years/
> --
>
> Amanda Keton (she/her)
>
> General Counsel
>
> Wikimedia Foundation 
> *NOTICE: This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you
> have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
> mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical
> reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
> members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
> on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
> .*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Block of Wikipedia in Turkey ruled as unconstitutional

[John Erling Blad]

Both en.wikipedia.org and tr.wikipedia.org are still blocked.

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 10:44 PM Mike Godwin  wrote:
>
> Great news! Even if the court's decision isn't implemented by the current
> Turkish government, it is important to have established that the block was
> a violation of constitutional principles.
>
> Mike
>
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 4:40 PM Katherine Maher 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have some good news to share with you all -- after nearly three years of
> > Wikipedia being blocked in Turkey, the Turkish Constitutional Court has
> > ruled that this is unconstitutional. We hope that access will be restored
> > soon in light of this ruling, and will keep you updated as we hear further
> > developments.
> >
> > Please join me in congratulating the Wikimedia community in Turkey, the
> > millions of Wikipedia readers in Turkey, and all of those struggling under
> > censorship around the world, on this critical affirmation of the
> > fundamental right to knowledge.
> >
> > Imposed in April of 2017, the block has prevented the 80+ million people
> > in Turkey from accessing and participating in all language versions of
> > Wikipedia. It also prevented members of our community in Turkey from freely
> > engaging with the projects and impaired our movement’s global effort to
> > represent the sum of all knowledge.
> >
> > As many of you might recall, we had filed an urgent application to the
> > European Court of Human Rights in April 2019. Our petition on the legality
> > of the access ban is currently before the ECHR and we are evaluating our
> > next steps based on this latest ruling.
> >
> > A team from within and outside the Wikimedia Foundation has been working
> > diligently since the block was instituted to restore full access in Turkey.
> > Throughout this process, we have been guided by our Wikimedia values and a
> > belief that Wikipedia must be accessible in its entirety; with no
> > censorship of any kind to be tolerated. We worked closely with Wikimedia
> > community members in Turkey to understand and act in a way that reflected
> > their needs, wishes, and local context. We also benefited greatly from
> > conversations with experts around the world.
> >
> > We will be posting more information on the Foundation website soon. In the
> > meantime, I wanted to offer my sincere appreciation and admiration to the
> > members of our community in Turkey -- you have shown great integrity,
> > courage, and dedication. Your unwavering commitment to the Wikimedia
> > projects, despite the obstacles placed in front of you, is an inspiration
> > to us all.
> >
> > Thank you to every Wikimedia community member around the world who showed
> > support for the Turkish community. Your commitment to our sense of
> > community and the strength of our global movement is an inspiration.
> >
> > Finally, I would also like to thank the many Foundation staff and others
> > involved over the past months for your exceptional diligence,
> > professionalism, and tact in handling a delicate situation.
> >
> > While this is a favorable ruling for our case in Turkey, it remains to be
> > seen whether the Turkish government will indeed restore access in Turkey.
> > And serious threats to free knowledge remain around the world. Today's
> > ruling is a reminder of the work we still left to do.
> >
> > But at this moment, let us celebrate this important recognition that the
> > right to information is fundamental to every human, with happy anticipation
> > of the return of Turkey to our global community of editors, readers, and
> > knowledge seekers.
> >
> > Katherine
> >
> > --
> >
> > Katherine Maher (she/her)
> >
> > Executive Director
> >
> > Wikimedia Foundation 
> >
> > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

This tend to diverge away from the chrome and into the content, which
is a lot more difficult to change. (Urgh, way to long…)

Anyway, I have this really-really weird idea that “staff” should
provide (extremely good) design elements, and then local projects
would chose to use them in favor of their own because they are better
than what the have locally. Those elements should typically provide
some features that would otherwise be to difficult or expensive to
make locally, thus the projects would want to use them.

Example 1: The staff could provide a complete set of design symbols
for featured articles, not the jammed together mix that is used now.
At some projects they even claim that the current kludges are what WMF
want to use, and that they are “Wikipedia”. Pretty weird.

It should be pretty easy to set up a project “Design elements:
featured articles”. We probably need them to have sufficient details
for badges, indicators, and pages. They should have symbolic names,
and they should probably adapt to the chosen skin. Remember, if the
design element is an SVG then it might be styled.

Remember to add a page indicator from the item on the local page
itself. Now we only add badges in the sidebar.

Added feature: The design elements will look good over all projects
and skins, and they will look consistent. (Increased conformance over
projects leads to decreased boundaries between the projects, that is
less “us and them”.)

Example 2: The staff could provide necessary modules for common tasks
like an infobox, navbox, taxbox, succession box, etc. There are not
many of them. Most of them will use structures at Wikidata, with some
local adaptation.

The present use of modules tries to support existing templates, but I
believe that is a wrong approach. By doing this we perpetuate present
problems with the templates. Instead of redirecting calls to modules
through templates we should simply call the modules as
{{module:infobox}} in the articles, and only add arguments as
necessary to solve problems. The module should check out the type of
item (P21) and act accordingly. (Yes it is possible, but then modules
must implement and use a __tostring metamethod. It is a tech-ting.)

Added feature: I guess editors will be glad to finally have infoboxes
that work as expected in all articles, and the conflicts between
various infoboxes would go away . (The soccer fans will probably hate
it, they can't style the infobox in the colors of their favorite
soccer team. Don't tell them they can still mess with the colors
through template styles.)

Example 3: The staff could provide well-defined help pages, that could
be localized at Meta, and the localized page transcluded into the
local project. It should be possible to link to such pages as if they
were local, and even if locally overridden they should always exist.

It is a pretty large undertaking to define all necessary help pages to
kick off a local project. To have some help pages, even in English or
some other language, would be a real boon. Also to link those pages we
need a slightly more advanced help indicator. Now we only have one
link that follows the page, but there are probably several given the
role and state of the user.

Added feature: It would be possible to find the help pages, thus
making the editing simpler. (Some oldtimers will probably get a grudge
over their favorite nit-pick items being thrown out on the common
pages, and will thus insist on keeping their favorite help page.)

On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 9:38 AM Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> Yes, and that's why I really, really, really want to hear more feedback on
> it from various communities of editors, including criticism. That's also
> why in my proposal I write that it's a requirement that communities must be
> able to override any central functionality, and I only speak about the
> generic principle of making templates global, mentioning particular
> templates only as examples. I leave everything else to the communities.
>
> The parts about which I wrote that they will have to be done mostly by
> staff are the parts that require heavy PHP coding, code review, and
> testing, and as far as I know, most of the people who know the relevant
> areas of code well are on staff. (I might be wrong. Also, everything I'm 
> saying
> here are my own assessments, and they don't represent the WMF in any way.)
>
> However, the more volunteer developers and editors participate in it, the
> better—not because it saves money, but because it makes the project more
> "owned" by the community.
>
>
> בתאריך שבת, 14 בדצמ׳ 2019, 09:12, מאת John Erling Blad ‏:
>
> > I get a little scared when I read “probably, but not necessarily,
> > mostly by staff” because all kind of central standardization creates a
> > whole lot of arguing in the individual subprojects. If that
> > standardization means changing a whole lot of templates 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

For those interested: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 10:47 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
>
> Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
>
> John Erling Blad
> /jeblad

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

I get a little scared when I read “probably, but not necessarily,
mostly by staff” because all kind of central standardization creates a
whole lot of arguing in the individual subprojects. If that
standardization means changing a whole lot of templates I'm afraid it
will create much more fighting than real solutions. I'm a little
“Marvin” here…

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 10:14 AM Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> ‫בתאריך יום ה׳, 12 בדצמ׳ 2019 ב-23:37 מאת ‪Pine W‬‏ <‪wiki.p...@gmail.com
> ‬‏>:‬
>
> > I'm thinking out loud here. Are there any estimates of would be required in
> > terms of time (both staff time and community time) and money to make
> > templates and other tools be much easier to globalize across wikis and
> > across skins? I'm looking for an answer that is more specific than "a lot",
> > but isn't a promise or a detailed estimate.
> >
>
> Difficult to say.
>
> I won't make an actual time estimation, because I'm very bad at doing it,
> and because I have too many conflicts of interest ;)
>
> However, I do hope to give you something more specific than "a lot". I
> envision the following feasible plan for "global modules and templates,
> phase 1":
> * Make a localization framework for modules. (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238417 ; probably, but not necessarily,
> mostly by staff)
> * Develop a documentation page and a framework for making robust modules (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238532 ; probably, but not necessarily,
> mostly by staff).
> * Make modules storable and loadable from a global repository, and
> *actually enable it on all Wikimedia projects* (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T41610 ; probably, but not necessarily,
> mostly by staff).
> * Migrate most local modules from all the wikis to using global modules,
> and deleting all the migrated local modules. This will have to be done by
> the editors communities in many wikis, and it will only be feasible if all
> the points above are planned and executed well. The challenges I expect at
> this step are:
> ** Making sure that just the right amount of things are global and
> everything that communities want to override locally can be conveniently
> overridden.
> ** Making tough choices about which modules to use when several communities
> developed modules with similar functionality. For example: English, French,
> Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew Wikipedias have modules for loading Wikidata
> values. They aren't the same, but they probably should be. Merging them
> into a global module will require a lot of good-faith collaboration.
>
> Note that I only mentioned modules. Templates have some extra challenges.
> But once modules are done well, a "phase 2" of this project, that would
> tackle templates, will become possible. Also, global gadgets will have to
> be a separate project. Maybe the same localization framework can be used
> for both modules and gadgets, but I cannot think of anything else that they
> really have in common.
>
> All of the above is my interpretation of discussions in the recent Tech
> Conf in Atlanta (other people may have a significantly different
> interpretation). See these Phab tasks, and the web of other tasks linked to
> them:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234661
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52329
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

A skin does not have to change the content, most of the skin is chrome
and can be changed without touching the content at all.

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 1:12 AM Nick Wilson (Quiddity)
 wrote:
>
> Multiple responses:
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 10:07 AM Juergen Fenn  wrote:
>
> > Am 12.12.19 um 02:25 Uhr schrieb Strainu:
> > > There is also a
> > > question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> > > makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience
> >
> > Most authors still use desktop computers for writing articles or doing
> > maintenance work. Mobile is for readers.
> >
>
> That is true in most wikis, but not all, and it's a slowly growing
> percentage. Some contributors only have a phone as their single (or
> sometimes even just *shared*) access to the internet. Much of the world
> cannot afford a laptop/desktop computer. There are edit-percentage
> statistics in this spreadsheet in columns P and K:
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a-UBqsYtJl6gpauJyanx0nyxuPqRvhzJRN817XpkuS8/edit#gid=1610967999
> Secondly, we always need/hope to find new editors in all the projects, and
> if the readers are getting to our projects via mobile, then that could be
> the best place to get them started on the path to being an editor
> (occasional or regular). Getting readers to take that first step of an
> initial edit, can be the hardest part.
> Lastly, there's a useful essay by this Ewiki admin about mobile editing.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cullen328/Smartphone_editing
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:21 PM Amir E. Aharoni <
> amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
> > The tragic thing here is that reading is increasingly done on mobile
> > devices, and in some countries it's already the majority of pageviews. But
> > editing is mostly done on the desktop, which looks completely differently.
> > So editors don't even see a preview of how what they write will look for
> > *most* readers.
>
>
> Agreed.
> There is an old gadget on Enwiki (and re-used at a dozen other wikis, per
> [[m:Gadgets]]) which shows a mockup of how the article might appear on a
> small screen. I suspect it needs improvements in a few aspects (design,
> performance), but it works quite well.
> Anyone can see how it looks (ideally from a laptop-or-bigger window!) with
> this URL:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon?withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-mobile-sidebar.js=MediaWiki:Gadget-mobile-sidebar.css
> Or here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/juXqcKW.png
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:26 PM Strainu  wrote:
>
> > The main problem I see with that is that is changing all the on-wiki
> > templates and scripts that work with the current skin. There is also a
> > question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> > makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience (and the beta mode
> > there is super cool, but still breaks some templates).
>
>
> Templates that still have problems on mobile at some wikis, can usually be
> fixed with the assistance of this page (especially section #12)
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_mobile_friendly_articles_on_Wikimedia_wikis
> -- I'll be sending a reminder to a few VillagePumps about this in the next
> few weeks.
>
> Gadgets/scripts sometimes work as expected across different skins, and
> sometimes not. That's a very different and distinct problem from templates.
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 8:58 PM Aron Manning  wrote:
>
> > That's nice. Try these redesigns with an adblocker for a comparison:
>
>
> I've just added a new batch of links that I learned about yesterday, to
> that page. ;)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns=930505897=913318977=source
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:38 PM Todd Allen  wrote:
>
> > Erm, I remember what websites looked like in 1996. I even made some then.
> > It looks nothing like that.
> >
> > On the other hand, on the site you linked to? The first thing I see is an
> > absolutely huge photo of a robot looking at me. I have to scroll down past
> > that to get to the actual meat, the text content. *That* looks like 1996.
> >
> > I'll take the way we have it over that, thanks very much.
>
>
> I initially learned HTML from this site/book c.1998,
> https://web.archive.org/web/2818170520/http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/index.html
> and ever since I've appreciated clean simple structured content. I
> completely understand what you mean here, Todd. Although I'd balance it out
> with: not-all-wikis-are-Wikipedia, and hence some of the Wikivoyages have
> their distinct intro-landscape-image design, e.g.
> https://es.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Tokio
>
> I think we all generally endorse incremental improvements, instead of
> drastic overhauls. Overhauls can make many users (of any site) confused or
> frustrated, and our users (readers and editors) are the whole point of this
> endeavour. The problem is there simply haven't been many improvements to
> the basic site-design elements over 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

I don't see any reason to turn this into a help thread, but yes there
are a few browsers that don't fully support responsive design. For
example IE11 has trouble with responsive images.[1]

Mobile best Practices become a W3C Recommendation 29 July 2008, we're
not compliant as far as I know.[2]

[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=picture
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 12:39 AM Todd Allen  wrote:
>
> I'm not using my cell phone. I'm using an actual computer with a 28"
> monitor.
>
> There's really no excuse, in web design, for something aside from the
> content to absolutely overwhelm the whole monitor on a first view. That
> robot image should be about a third of its size.
>
> Todd
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 4:22 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Try holding your cellphone vertically.
> >
> > tor. 12. des. 2019, 22.38 skrev Todd Allen :
> >
> > > Erm, I remember what websites looked like in 1996. I even made some then.
> > > It looks nothing like that.
> > >
> > > On the other hand, on the site you linked to? The first thing I see is an
> > > absolutely huge photo of a robot looking at me. I have to scroll down
> > past
> > > that to get to the actual meat, the text content. *That* looks like 1996.
> > >
> > > I'll take the way we have it over that, thanks very much.
> > >
> > > Todd
> > >
> > > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 2:48 PM John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> > > >
> > > > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > > > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> > > >
> > > > John Erling Blad
> > > > /jeblad
> > > > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

Try holding your cellphone vertically.

tor. 12. des. 2019, 22.38 skrev Todd Allen :

> Erm, I remember what websites looked like in 1996. I even made some then.
> It looks nothing like that.
>
> On the other hand, on the site you linked to? The first thing I see is an
> absolutely huge photo of a robot looking at me. I have to scroll down past
> that to get to the actual meat, the text content. *That* looks like 1996.
>
> I'll take the way we have it over that, thanks very much.
>
> Todd
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 2:48 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> >
> > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> >
> > John Erling Blad
> > /jeblad
> > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

Seems like Marius Hauken delivered the thesis in 2012.[1]
A short video is available on YouTube.[2]
He got several awards, at most three in one week. [3]
A few of them are listed here.[4][5]

[1] Hauken, Marius Aa., and Kunst- Og Designhøgskolen I Bergen. Same
Shit, Different Wrapping (2012): Ca 200. Print.
[2] Wikipedia-concept for smartphones and tablets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-xI-mPDLBo
[3] Tre designpriser på en uke
https://www.bt.no/nyheter/okonomi/i/eagk4/tre-designpriser-paa-en-uke
[4] REDESIGNING WIKIPEDIA FOR MOBILE & TABLET
https://europeandesign.org/submissions/redesigning-wikipedia-for-mobile-tablet/
[5] Masteroppgave, redesign av Wikipedia for touchenheter ”Same shit
different wrapping”
https://www.grafill.no/visuelt/vinnere/2013/interaktiv-design/studentarbeid/masteroppgave-redesign-av-wikipedia-for-touchenheter-same-shit-different-wr

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 2:01 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> I wrote 1996 in the subject field because that was the year I made a
> wikisite with tabbed interface, and experimented with a paper-like
> design in Xt. More or less what designers today would call a material
> design. The present design is what I would call Monobook 2.0, and that
> imply a 15 year old design. Monobook was rolled out in 2004-2005 if I
> remember correctly.
>
> At nowiki we had a discussion with a designer from The Oslo School of
> Architecture and Design around 2009, and he come up with a really nice
> design. The design at SNL (the other Norwegian lexicon) starts to look
> more and more like it. The design proposal was deemed to radical and
> to simple for Wikipedia. He got several awards for the design.
>
> No, I'm not a designer, but I do like good design.
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:34 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > Thank you, but discussing how your site or any other specific site
> > looked like in some year is an distraction.
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 12:30 PM Shlomi Fish  wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi John!
> > >
> > > On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:47:21 +0100
> > > John Erling Blad  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> > > >
> > > > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > > > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> > > >
> > >
> > > I took a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and it doesn't 
> > > look
> > > anything like a geocities/etc. site from the 90s, and I feel it doesn't 
> > > look
> > > bad.
> > >
> > > For the record that was my site at around 1998 -
> > > https://old-1998-site.shlomifish.org/ and people complained enough that my
> > > current site looks like "[insert  year here]" that I added a FAQ entry:
> > >
> > > https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/site_looks_old.xhtml
> > >
> > > See https://everybootstrap.site/ for how many contemporary sites look 
> > > like.
> > >
> > > Someone on freenode told me he thinks plain black-on-white sites look 
> > > great.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > Shlomi
> > >
> > > > John Erling Blad
> > > > /jeblad
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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> > > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > Shlomi Fish   https://www.shlomifish.org/
> > > https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/C-and-CPP/bad-elements/
> > >
> > > As it turns out, compiling a C program from more than 20 years ago is 
> > > actually
> > > a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work.
> > > — https://passy.svbtle.com/building-vim-from-1993-today
> > >
> > > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

I wrote 1996 in the subject field because that was the year I made a
wikisite with tabbed interface, and experimented with a paper-like
design in Xt. More or less what designers today would call a material
design. The present design is what I would call Monobook 2.0, and that
imply a 15 year old design. Monobook was rolled out in 2004-2005 if I
remember correctly.

At nowiki we had a discussion with a designer from The Oslo School of
Architecture and Design around 2009, and he come up with a really nice
design. The design at SNL (the other Norwegian lexicon) starts to look
more and more like it. The design proposal was deemed to radical and
to simple for Wikipedia. He got several awards for the design.

No, I'm not a designer, but I do like good design.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:34 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> Thank you, but discussing how your site or any other specific site
> looked like in some year is an distraction.
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 12:30 PM Shlomi Fish  wrote:
> >
> > Hi John!
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:47:21 +0100
> > John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> > >
> > > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> > >
> >
> > I took a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and it doesn't look
> > anything like a geocities/etc. site from the 90s, and I feel it doesn't look
> > bad.
> >
> > For the record that was my site at around 1998 -
> > https://old-1998-site.shlomifish.org/ and people complained enough that my
> > current site looks like "[insert  year here]" that I added a FAQ entry:
> >
> > https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/site_looks_old.xhtml
> >
> > See https://everybootstrap.site/ for how many contemporary sites look like.
> >
> > Someone on freenode told me he thinks plain black-on-white sites look great.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Shlomi
> >
> > > John Erling Blad
> > > /jeblad
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to:
> > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Shlomi Fish   https://www.shlomifish.org/
> > https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/C-and-CPP/bad-elements/
> >
> > As it turns out, compiling a C program from more than 20 years ago is 
> > actually
> > a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work.
> > — https://passy.svbtle.com/building-vim-from-1993-today
> >
> > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

Thank you, but discussing how your site or any other specific site
looked like in some year is an distraction.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 12:30 PM Shlomi Fish  wrote:
>
> Hi John!
>
> On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:47:21 +0100
> John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> >
> > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> >
>
> I took a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and it doesn't look
> anything like a geocities/etc. site from the 90s, and I feel it doesn't look
> bad.
>
> For the record that was my site at around 1998 -
> https://old-1998-site.shlomifish.org/ and people complained enough that my
> current site looks like "[insert  year here]" that I added a FAQ entry:
>
> https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/site_looks_old.xhtml
>
> See https://everybootstrap.site/ for how many contemporary sites look like.
>
> Someone on freenode told me he thinks plain black-on-white sites look great.
>
> Regards,
>
> Shlomi
>
> > John Erling Blad
> > /jeblad
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to:
> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>
>
> --
>
> Shlomi Fish   https://www.shlomifish.org/
> https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/C-and-CPP/bad-elements/
>
> As it turns out, compiling a C program from more than 20 years ago is actually
> a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work.
> — https://passy.svbtle.com/building-vim-from-1993-today
>
> Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

I know about the work on changing the interactions, but this is about
the design issue.
All of the skins are horribly outdated, sorry to those that made them,
but I guess they already know.
What I would really like is a new fully responsive skin, using the
concepts defined by w3, that also look modern.


On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 2:26 AM Strainu  wrote:
>
> În joi, 12 dec. 2019 la 00:21, Amir Sarabadani  a scris:
> >
> > Do you know about
> > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements ?
>
> Those are all evolutions, I think the question here was about a revolution.
>
> The main problem I see with that is that is changing all the on-wiki
> templates and scripts that work with the current skin. There is also a
> question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience (and the beta mode
> there is super cool, but still breaks some templates).
>
> Strainu
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 10:48 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > > Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?
> > >
> > > Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
> > > https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens
> > >
> > > John Erling Blad
> > > /jeblad
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Amir (he/him)
> > ___
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> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
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> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
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>
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[Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[John Erling Blad]

Could we please update them with a slightly more up-to-date skin?

Take a look at our Norwegian competitor in the lexicon field.
https://snl.no/kunstig_intelligens

John Erling Blad
/jeblad
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Universal forced HTTPS backdoor in Kazakhstan

[John Erling Blad]

Google, Apple, Mozilla move to block Kazakh surveillance system

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kazakhstan-internet-surveillance/google-apple-mozilla-move-to-block-kazakh-surveillance-system-idUSKCN1VB17Q
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Universal forced HTTPS backdoor in Kazakhstan

[John Erling Blad]

Seems like something happen early Friday morning.[1]

[1] https://censoredplanet.org/kazakhstan/live

On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 2:43 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> You are right. “Firefox and Chrome disable pin validation for pinned hosts
> whose validated certificate chain terminates at a user-defined trust anchor
> (rather than a built-in trust anchor). This means that for users who
> imported custom root certificates all pinning violations are ignored.” [1]
>
> [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key_Pinning
>
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 2:07 PM Alex Monk  wrote:
>
>> Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe browsers always ignored HPKP rules
>> when presented with a cert signed by a CA that is locally installed rather
>> than default.
>>
>> On Sun, 28 Jul 2019, 12:58 John Erling Blad,  wrote:
>>
>> > The Kazakhstan MITM could be stopped by HTTP Public Key Pinning [1], but
>> > Chrome seems to have dropped support for HPKP[2]? Dropping HPKP made the
>> > MITM attack possible, by forcing the users to install the root
>> certificate,
>> > as many of the sites listed has been on the HPKP list. With HPKP in
>> place
>> > the scheme would be somewhat harder to implement.
>> >
>> > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning
>> > [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1412438
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 3:05 PM Yury Bulka <
>> > setthemf...@privacyrequired.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > I don't see any position from Mozilla on this yet:
>> > > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114
>> > >
>> > >
>> >
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wnuKAhACo3E
>> > >
>> > > Couldn't find anything about Google Chrome.
>> > >
>> > > Meanwhile, I have emailed secur...@wikimedia.org with a link to this
>> > > discussion (hope it's not a terribly inappropriate thing to do).
>> > >
>> > > I'd be great to hear from WMF about their view on this.
>> > >
>> > > Best,
>> > > Yury.
>> > >
>> > > Yury Bulka  writes:
>> > >
>> > > > I'm not in Kazakhstan and am not in directly touch with any of
>> > > > wikimedians there, so I don't know their position.
>> > > >
>> > > > However, I'm not sure how much freedom they have in expressing their
>> > > > honest opinion about this publicly. Simply because it is always a
>> > > > pros-and-cons calculation to criticise your local goverment in such
>> > > > situations.
>> > > >
>> > > > Yaroslav Blanter  writes:
>> > > >
>> > > >> I do not think Kazakhstan has a chapter. In the past, some Kazakh
>> > > >> Wikimedians enjoyed close collaboration with the government (for
>> > > example,
>> > > >> the Kazakhstani Encyclopedia has been released under a free license
>> > and
>> > > >> verbatim copied to the Kazakh Wikipedia, so that I do not expect
>> much.
>> > > >>
>> > > >> Cheers
>> > > >> Yaroslav
>> > > >>
>> > > >> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 12:45 PM Thomas Townsend <
>> > homesec1...@gmail.com
>> > > >
>> > > >> wrote:
>> > > >>
>> > > >>> Yury
>> > > >>>
>> > > >>> What is the position of the Kazakhstan chapter on this?
>> > > >>>
>> > > >>> The Turnip
>> > > >>>
>> > > >>> On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 at 11:36, Yury Bulka
>> > > >>>  wrote:
>> > > >>> >
>> > > >>> > I'm sure many have heard about this:
>> > > >>> >
>> > > >>>
>> > >
>> >
>> https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/kazakhstan-https-security-certificate.html
>> > > >>> >
>> > > >>> > Essentially, the government in Kazakhstan started forcing
>> citizens
>> > > into
>> > > >>> > installing a root TLS certificate on their devices that would
>> allow
>> > > the
>> > > >>> > government to intercept, decrypt and manipulate all HTTPS
>> traffic.
>> > > >>> >
>> > > >>> > Without the centi

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Universal forced HTTPS backdoor in Kazakhstan

[John Erling Blad]

You are right. “Firefox and Chrome disable pin validation for pinned hosts
whose validated certificate chain terminates at a user-defined trust anchor
(rather than a built-in trust anchor). This means that for users who
imported custom root certificates all pinning violations are ignored.” [1]

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key_Pinning

On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 2:07 PM Alex Monk  wrote:

> Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe browsers always ignored HPKP rules
> when presented with a cert signed by a CA that is locally installed rather
> than default.
>
> On Sun, 28 Jul 2019, 12:58 John Erling Blad,  wrote:
>
> > The Kazakhstan MITM could be stopped by HTTP Public Key Pinning [1], but
> > Chrome seems to have dropped support for HPKP[2]? Dropping HPKP made the
> > MITM attack possible, by forcing the users to install the root
> certificate,
> > as many of the sites listed has been on the HPKP list. With HPKP in place
> > the scheme would be somewhat harder to implement.
> >
> > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning
> > [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1412438
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 3:05 PM Yury Bulka <
> > setthemf...@privacyrequired.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I don't see any position from Mozilla on this yet:
> > > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wnuKAhACo3E
> > >
> > > Couldn't find anything about Google Chrome.
> > >
> > > Meanwhile, I have emailed secur...@wikimedia.org with a link to this
> > > discussion (hope it's not a terribly inappropriate thing to do).
> > >
> > > I'd be great to hear from WMF about their view on this.
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Yury.
> > >
> > > Yury Bulka  writes:
> > >
> > > > I'm not in Kazakhstan and am not in directly touch with any of
> > > > wikimedians there, so I don't know their position.
> > > >
> > > > However, I'm not sure how much freedom they have in expressing their
> > > > honest opinion about this publicly. Simply because it is always a
> > > > pros-and-cons calculation to criticise your local goverment in such
> > > > situations.
> > > >
> > > > Yaroslav Blanter  writes:
> > > >
> > > >> I do not think Kazakhstan has a chapter. In the past, some Kazakh
> > > >> Wikimedians enjoyed close collaboration with the government (for
> > > example,
> > > >> the Kazakhstani Encyclopedia has been released under a free license
> > and
> > > >> verbatim copied to the Kazakh Wikipedia, so that I do not expect
> much.
> > > >>
> > > >> Cheers
> > > >> Yaroslav
> > > >>
> > > >> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 12:45 PM Thomas Townsend <
> > homesec1...@gmail.com
> > > >
> > > >> wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>> Yury
> > > >>>
> > > >>> What is the position of the Kazakhstan chapter on this?
> > > >>>
> > > >>> The Turnip
> > > >>>
> > > >>> On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 at 11:36, Yury Bulka
> > > >>>  wrote:
> > > >>> >
> > > >>> > I'm sure many have heard about this:
> > > >>> >
> > > >>>
> > >
> >
> https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/kazakhstan-https-security-certificate.html
> > > >>> >
> > > >>> > Essentially, the government in Kazakhstan started forcing
> citizens
> > > into
> > > >>> > installing a root TLS certificate on their devices that would
> allow
> > > the
> > > >>> > government to intercept, decrypt and manipulate all HTTPS
> traffic.
> > > >>> >
> > > >>> > Without the centificate, it seems, citizens can't access HTTPS
> > pages
> > > (at
> > > >>> > least on some ISPs).
> > > >>> >
> > > >>> > I think this has serious implications for Wikipedia & Wikimedia,
> as
> > > not
> > > >>> > only they would be easily able to see which articles people read,
> > but
> > > >>> > also steal login credentials, depseudonymize people and even
> hijack
> > > >>> > a

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Universal forced HTTPS backdoor in Kazakhstan

[John Erling Blad]

The Kazakhstan MITM could be stopped by HTTP Public Key Pinning [1], but
Chrome seems to have dropped support for HPKP[2]? Dropping HPKP made the
MITM attack possible, by forcing the users to install the root certificate,
as many of the sites listed has been on the HPKP list. With HPKP in place
the scheme would be somewhat harder to implement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1412438

On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 3:05 PM Yury Bulka 
wrote:

> I don't see any position from Mozilla on this yet:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wnuKAhACo3E
>
> Couldn't find anything about Google Chrome.
>
> Meanwhile, I have emailed secur...@wikimedia.org with a link to this
> discussion (hope it's not a terribly inappropriate thing to do).
>
> I'd be great to hear from WMF about their view on this.
>
> Best,
> Yury.
>
> Yury Bulka  writes:
>
> > I'm not in Kazakhstan and am not in directly touch with any of
> > wikimedians there, so I don't know their position.
> >
> > However, I'm not sure how much freedom they have in expressing their
> > honest opinion about this publicly. Simply because it is always a
> > pros-and-cons calculation to criticise your local goverment in such
> > situations.
> >
> > Yaroslav Blanter  writes:
> >
> >> I do not think Kazakhstan has a chapter. In the past, some Kazakh
> >> Wikimedians enjoyed close collaboration with the government (for
> example,
> >> the Kazakhstani Encyclopedia has been released under a free license and
> >> verbatim copied to the Kazakh Wikipedia, so that I do not expect much.
> >>
> >> Cheers
> >> Yaroslav
> >>
> >> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 12:45 PM Thomas Townsend  >
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Yury
> >>>
> >>> What is the position of the Kazakhstan chapter on this?
> >>>
> >>> The Turnip
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 at 11:36, Yury Bulka
> >>>  wrote:
> >>> >
> >>> > I'm sure many have heard about this:
> >>> >
> >>>
> https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/kazakhstan-https-security-certificate.html
> >>> >
> >>> > Essentially, the government in Kazakhstan started forcing citizens
> into
> >>> > installing a root TLS certificate on their devices that would allow
> the
> >>> > government to intercept, decrypt and manipulate all HTTPS traffic.
> >>> >
> >>> > Without the centificate, it seems, citizens can't access HTTPS pages
> (at
> >>> > least on some ISPs).
> >>> >
> >>> > I think this has serious implications for Wikipedia & Wikimedia, as
> not
> >>> > only they would be easily able to see which articles people read, but
> >>> > also steal login credentials, depseudonymize people and even hijack
> >>> > admin accounts.
> >>> >
> >>> > Another danger is that if this effort by Kazakhstan will succeed,
> other
> >>> > governments may start doing the same.
> >>> >
> >>> > I wonder if WMF has any position on this yet?
> >>> >
> >>> > Best,
> >>> > Yury.
> >>> >
> >>> > ___
> >>> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> >>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> >>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> >>> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >>> > Unsubscribe:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> >>> 
> >>>
> >>> ___
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> >>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> >>> 
> >> ___
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> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fram en.wp office yearlock block

[John Erling Blad]

So much for not quoting anyone.

/jeblad

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 5:36 PM Fæ  wrote:
>
> This misses the point, as others have highlighted already.
>
> The WMF can and /should/ globally and permanently ban paedophiles,
> terrorists, system hackers and people making multiple cross-wiki death
> threats or threats of suicide. There are perfectly good and
> understandable reasons as to why the evidence behind these attacks and
> threats would be kept unpublished, it's seriously personal or criminal
> stuff.
>
> The WMF making topic bans, interaction bans and limited project
> specific bans against Wikipedians is a brand new invention, which goes
> against the pre-existing understanding that the WMF do not replace
> existing and perfectly adequate community agreed procedures for
> banning bad behaviour on our projects. Once full time WMF employees
> start doing in parallel what volunteer administrators already do, then
> we should question why we do not *pay* volunteers administrators the
> same hourly rate and we are likely to see a mass exodus of
> administrators. After all, would you, say, deliver the post for free
> in your area for fun, but thereby take away decent full time
> employment with a guaranteed pension for your local postie?
>
> If the reason for the WMF stepping in to ban Fram for a year is
> because the WMF do not trust Wikipedia administrators or Wikipedia's
> Arbcom to take sensible action in harassment cases, then they should
> be raising that honestly and openly with Arbcom. If the English
> Wikipedia's policies are not fit for purpose, or implementation of
> policy is incompetent, we need a much bigger discussion than whether
> Fram did something so terrible it cannot be named, but oddly was not
> worth a global ban but only the equivalent of a 12 month block on
> Wikipedia while they are free to do whatever they feel like on other
> Wikimedia projects.
>
> Fae
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>
> On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 at 15:35, John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > When you bad mouth other users there should be, and will be, consequences.
> > An admin got desysoped and banned after repeated warnings? So what? The
> > only ting to be learned is that some people believe they can do whatever
> > they want and it has no consequences, and other people goes ballistic when
> > consequences happen.
> >
> > I would have given desysoped fram and 14 days to cool off, and if that did
> > not work out repeated with one month. Banning someone for one year is like
> > telling them to leave and don't come back. Someone at WMF is clearly overly
> > sensitive, but not reacting would also be wrong.
> > ___
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> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fram en.wp office yearlock block

[John Erling Blad]

When you bad mouth other users there should be, and will be, consequences.
An admin got desysoped and banned after repeated warnings? So what? The
only ting to be learned is that some people believe they can do whatever
they want and it has no consequences, and other people goes ballistic when
consequences happen.

I would have given desysoped fram and 14 days to cool off, and if that did
not work out repeated with one month. Banning someone for one year is like
telling them to leave and don't come back. Someone at WMF is clearly overly
sensitive, but not reacting would also be wrong.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiJournals: A proposal to become a new sister project

[John Erling Blad]

> > One reason; reach.
> >
>
> In academia reach -per se- is not a big deal, while impact is.

Reach leads to impact. You can't get impact without reach, but reach
in non-scientific communities does not necessarily turn into reach in
scientific communities.

> At nowiki we vere approached some years ago by a
> > university about publishing cutting edge research in fish farming. We
> > could not publish their work because some claimed it to be "original
> > research". Sure it was, and it was darn good original research too. I
> > don't think that was a single occurence, other communities has
> > probably had similar questions.
> >
>
> On Wikipedia you have no means to tell what is a good research, anyway.

There are nothing that blocks Wikipedia from doing peer review. (It
has implicit peer review.) What you propose for WikiJournal is to make
peer review a policy. That does not in itself turn articles into good
research.

You can turn your statement around and say if you can not write good
reasearch on Wikipedia, then you can not write good reasearch on
WikiJournal. The tools are basically the same, the only real
differences are in the policies.

Actually, some of the example articles at WikiJournal are nothing more
than FA, but that is another discussion.

Intent is the major difference on what WikiJournal could be compared
to Wikipedia.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiJournals: A proposal to become a new sister project

[John Erling Blad]

How often do you expect a scientific article to be translated?

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 7:46 PM James Heilman  wrote:
>
> Wiki Journals use CC BY SA. We do not support or want to us ND as that
> would prevent translation into other languages. That is why I disagree with
> Plan S's move to allow ND.
>
> James
>
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 9:08 AM Vi to  wrote:
>
> > En.wikiversity user I'm dealing with was a custodian (in other words a well
> > established user within the community).
> >
> > Keeping it short my main concern is: we are a naturally democratic
> > community, while the science cannot be. Also, we've been attracting low
> > quality "research" for years.
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > Il giorno lun 3 giu 2019 alle ore 16:36 James Heilman 
> > ha
> > scritto:
> >
> > > The peer review process and the editors of the journals in question. This
> > > is the same mechanism that prevents gibberish from getting into all peer
> > > reviewed literature.
> > >
> > > J
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 6:30 AM Vi to  wrote:
> > >
> > > > In years I've seen countless attempts to put gibberish on our projects
> > > > which were eventually defeated by the "no original research"
> > principle.
> > > > Even en.wikiversity struggled with a now banned user (and his
> > > > friends/enablers) pushing lots of gibberish about cold fusion,
> > paranormal
> > > > and Wikimedia user themselves. So I ask, what will prevent this kind of
> > > > gibberish from slowing infiltrating such project?
> > > >
> > > > Don't get me wrong but I think this is the first question in order to
> > > > define a "business model" for the project: why would a "serious"
> > research
> > > > group choose to publish there instead of already existing OA journals
> > or
> > > > classical PR journals?
> > > >
> > > > Vito
> > > >
> > > > Il giorno lun 3 giu 2019 alle ore 04:16 Thomas Shafee <
> > > > thomas.sha...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> > > >
> > > > > Yes, we put together a little checklist back in round one (*link*
> > > > > <
> > > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Notes_on_Plan_S_compliance_criteria
> > > > > >
> > > > > ).
> > > > >
> > > > > Initially there were a few items that are currently not achieved
> > (e.g.
> > > > > JATS-compliant XML formatting). The revised Plan_S has reduced
> > > stringency
> > > > > and all the items that weren't hit happen to be optional. That being
> > > > said,
> > > > > things like JATS-compliant XML and citation metadata would be
> > valuable
> > > to
> > > > > implement anyway for machine readability.
> > > > >
> > > > > Thomas
> > > > >
> > > > > On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 04:53, James Heilman  wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > It already is Plan-S compliant :-)
> > > > > >
> > > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Licensing_and_rights
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Plan-S unfortunately is looking at allowing ND content.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > James
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 8:14 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
> > > > > > thrapostibong...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > Thomas
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Is it intended that the journals should be Plan-S compliant?
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Thrapostibongles
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 9:01 AM Thomas Shafee <
> > > > thomas.sha...@gmail.com>
> > > > > > > wrote:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > Hello Wikipedians,
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > Over the last few years, the WikiJournal User Group
> > > > > > > >  has
> > > been
> > > > > > > building
> > > > > > > > and testing a set of peer reviewed academic journals on a
> > > mediawiki
> > > > > > > > platform. The main types of articles are:
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > >- Existing Wikipedia articles submitted for external review
> > > and
> > > > > > > feedback
> > > > > > > >(example )
> > > > > > > >- From-scratch articles that, after review, are imported to
> > > > > > Wikipedia
> > > > > > > (
> > > > > > > >example )
> > > > > > > >- Original research articles that are not imported to
> > > Wikipedia
> > > > > > > (example
> > > > > > > ><
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Acute_gastrointestinal_bleeding_from_a_chronic_cause:_a_teaching_case_report
> > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > >)
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > *Proposal: WikiJournals as a new sister project
> > > > > > > > *
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > From a Wikipedian point of view, this is a complementary system
> > > to
> > > > > > > Featured
> > > > > > > > article review, but bridging the gap with external experts
> > > > > > > > <
> > > > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Peer_reviewers
> > > > > > >,
> > > > > > > > implementing 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiJournals: A proposal to become a new sister project

[John Erling Blad]

Do editing in a non-indexed draft space and then move the articles
into an indexed mainspace after passing peer review.

I guess a "WikiJournal" should be CC-ND by default. Authors should be
able to relax the license. If others are allowed to edit then the
license should be forced to CC-by-SA.

Authors should be explicitly listed, and if authors allow other to
edit, then they must explicitly say so. A "front matter" like in
Jekyll should be sufficient for declaring the authors.

There must also be a process for verifying the identity for authors.
That can be really fun! And btw, Mediawiki has a field for real names,
but lacks methods for verifying those names.

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 4:36 PM James Heilman  wrote:
>
> The peer review process and the editors of the journals in question. This
> is the same mechanism that prevents gibberish from getting into all peer
> reviewed literature.
>
> J
>
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 6:30 AM Vi to  wrote:
>
> > In years I've seen countless attempts to put gibberish on our projects
> > which were eventually defeated by the "no original research"  principle.
> > Even en.wikiversity struggled with a now banned user (and his
> > friends/enablers) pushing lots of gibberish about cold fusion, paranormal
> > and Wikimedia user themselves. So I ask, what will prevent this kind of
> > gibberish from slowing infiltrating such project?
> >
> > Don't get me wrong but I think this is the first question in order to
> > define a "business model" for the project: why would a "serious" research
> > group choose to publish there instead of already existing OA journals or
> > classical PR journals?
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > Il giorno lun 3 giu 2019 alle ore 04:16 Thomas Shafee <
> > thomas.sha...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> >
> > > Yes, we put together a little checklist back in round one (*link*
> > > <
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Notes_on_Plan_S_compliance_criteria
> > > >
> > > ).
> > >
> > > Initially there were a few items that are currently not achieved (e.g.
> > > JATS-compliant XML formatting). The revised Plan_S has reduced stringency
> > > and all the items that weren't hit happen to be optional. That being
> > said,
> > > things like JATS-compliant XML and citation metadata would be valuable to
> > > implement anyway for machine readability.
> > >
> > > Thomas
> > >
> > > On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 04:53, James Heilman  wrote:
> > >
> > > > It already is Plan-S compliant :-)
> > > >
> > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Licensing_and_rights
> > > >
> > > > Plan-S unfortunately is looking at allowing ND content.
> > > >
> > > > James
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 8:14 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
> > > > thrapostibong...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Thomas
> > > > >
> > > > > Is it intended that the journals should be Plan-S compliant?
> > > > >
> > > > > Thrapostibongles
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 9:01 AM Thomas Shafee <
> > thomas.sha...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Hello Wikipedians,
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Over the last few years, the WikiJournal User Group
> > > > > >  has been
> > > > > building
> > > > > > and testing a set of peer reviewed academic journals on a mediawiki
> > > > > > platform. The main types of articles are:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >- Existing Wikipedia articles submitted for external review and
> > > > > feedback
> > > > > >(example )
> > > > > >- From-scratch articles that, after review, are imported to
> > > > Wikipedia
> > > > > (
> > > > > >example )
> > > > > >- Original research articles that are not imported to Wikipedia
> > > > > (example
> > > > > ><
> > > > > >
> > > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Acute_gastrointestinal_bleeding_from_a_chronic_cause:_a_teaching_case_report
> > > > > > >
> > > > > >)
> > > > > >
> > > > > > *Proposal: WikiJournals as a new sister project
> > > > > > *
> > > > > >
> > > > > > From a Wikipedian point of view, this is a complementary system to
> > > > > Featured
> > > > > > article review, but bridging the gap with external experts
> > > > > > <
> > > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Peer_reviewers
> > > > >,
> > > > > > implementing established scholarly practices
> > > > > > <
> > > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Ethics_statement
> > > > > >,
> > > > > > and generating citable, doi-linked publications
> > > > > >  > >.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Please take a look and support/oppose/comment!
> > > > > > All the best,
> > > > > > Thomas Shafee
> > > > > >
> > > > > > ps, We are attempting to improve awareness within the existing
> > > > wikimedia
> > > > > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiJournals: A proposal to become a new sister project

[John Erling Blad]

One reason; reach. At nowiki we vere approached some years ago by a
university about publishing cutting edge research in fish farming. We
could not publish their work because some claimed it to be "original
research". Sure it was, and it was darn good original research too. I
don't think that was a single occurence, other communities has
probably had similar questions.

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 2:29 PM Vi to  wrote:
>
> In years I've seen countless attempts to put gibberish on our projects
> which were eventually defeated by the "no original research"  principle.
> Even en.wikiversity struggled with a now banned user (and his
> friends/enablers) pushing lots of gibberish about cold fusion, paranormal
> and Wikimedia user themselves. So I ask, what will prevent this kind of
> gibberish from slowing infiltrating such project?
>
> Don't get me wrong but I think this is the first question in order to
> define a "business model" for the project: why would a "serious" research
> group choose to publish there instead of already existing OA journals or
> classical PR journals?
>
> Vito
>
> Il giorno lun 3 giu 2019 alle ore 04:16 Thomas Shafee <
> thomas.sha...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> > Yes, we put together a little checklist back in round one (*link*
> > <
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Notes_on_Plan_S_compliance_criteria
> > >
> > ).
> >
> > Initially there were a few items that are currently not achieved (e.g.
> > JATS-compliant XML formatting). The revised Plan_S has reduced stringency
> > and all the items that weren't hit happen to be optional. That being said,
> > things like JATS-compliant XML and citation metadata would be valuable to
> > implement anyway for machine readability.
> >
> > Thomas
> >
> > On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 04:53, James Heilman  wrote:
> >
> > > It already is Plan-S compliant :-)
> > >
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Licensing_and_rights
> > >
> > > Plan-S unfortunately is looking at allowing ND content.
> > >
> > > James
> > >
> > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 8:14 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
> > > thrapostibong...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Thomas
> > > >
> > > > Is it intended that the journals should be Plan-S compliant?
> > > >
> > > > Thrapostibongles
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 9:01 AM Thomas Shafee 
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hello Wikipedians,
> > > > >
> > > > > Over the last few years, the WikiJournal User Group
> > > > >  has been
> > > > building
> > > > > and testing a set of peer reviewed academic journals on a mediawiki
> > > > > platform. The main types of articles are:
> > > > >
> > > > >- Existing Wikipedia articles submitted for external review and
> > > > feedback
> > > > >(example )
> > > > >- From-scratch articles that, after review, are imported to
> > > Wikipedia
> > > > (
> > > > >example )
> > > > >- Original research articles that are not imported to Wikipedia
> > > > (example
> > > > ><
> > > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Acute_gastrointestinal_bleeding_from_a_chronic_cause:_a_teaching_case_report
> > > > > >
> > > > >)
> > > > >
> > > > > *Proposal: WikiJournals as a new sister project
> > > > > *
> > > > >
> > > > > From a Wikipedian point of view, this is a complementary system to
> > > > Featured
> > > > > article review, but bridging the gap with external experts
> > > > > <
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Peer_reviewers
> > > >,
> > > > > implementing established scholarly practices
> > > > > <
> > > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Ethics_statement
> > > > >,
> > > > > and generating citable, doi-linked publications
> > > > > .
> > > > >
> > > > > Please take a look and support/oppose/comment!
> > > > > All the best,
> > > > > Thomas Shafee
> > > > >
> > > > > ps, We are attempting to improve awareness within the existing
> > > wikimedia
> > > > > community, so feel free to share with others.
> > > > > ___
> > > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > > Unsubscribe:
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > > > 
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiJournals: A proposal to become a new sister project

[John Erling Blad]

Ok. Works might not be accepted if people outside a well-defined group
contributes to the work.

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 3:50 PM Thomas Shafee  wrote:
>
> So at the moment, there is no locking of any sort. However, but it's noted
> that once an article is assigned a doi, that meaning-changing edits would
> be re-reviewed and an updated doi minted by from crossref's crossmark
> service <https://www.crossref.org/services/crossmark/> along the lines of this
> article <https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.13060.1>. Copyedits and
> formatting are always fine though. So far, the vast majority of editing has
> occurred before the doi assignment, and articles integrated into Wikipedia
> have a note in the top right to let people know that they can more
> logically be edited there (example
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Science/RIG-I_like_receptors>
> ).
>
> Thomas
>
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 14:18, John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > How do you handle lock down of articles? That is only listed authors should
> > write a given article, so you can't allow random user edit access as it is
> > today.
> >
> > Jeblad
> >
> > man. 3. jun. 2019, 04.16 skrev Thomas Shafee :
> >
> > > Yes, we put together a little checklist back in round one (*link*
> > > <
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Notes_on_Plan_S_compliance_criteria
> > > >
> > > ).
> > >
> > > Initially there were a few items that are currently not achieved (e.g.
> > > JATS-compliant XML formatting). The revised Plan_S has reduced stringency
> > > and all the items that weren't hit happen to be optional. That being
> > said,
> > > things like JATS-compliant XML and citation metadata would be valuable to
> > > implement anyway for machine readability.
> > >
> > > Thomas
> > >
> > > On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 04:53, James Heilman  wrote:
> > >
> > > > It already is Plan-S compliant :-)
> > > >
> > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Licensing_and_rights
> > > >
> > > > Plan-S unfortunately is looking at allowing ND content.
> > > >
> > > > James
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 8:14 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
> > > > thrapostibong...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Thomas
> > > > >
> > > > > Is it intended that the journals should be Plan-S compliant?
> > > > >
> > > > > Thrapostibongles
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 9:01 AM Thomas Shafee <
> > thomas.sha...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Hello Wikipedians,
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Over the last few years, the WikiJournal User Group
> > > > > > <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group> has been
> > > > > building
> > > > > > and testing a set of peer reviewed academic journals on a mediawiki
> > > > > > platform. The main types of articles are:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >- Existing Wikipedia articles submitted for external review and
> > > > > feedback
> > > > > >(example <https://doi.org/10.15347/wjs/2018.006>)
> > > > > >- From-scratch articles that, after review, are imported to
> > > > Wikipedia
> > > > > (
> > > > > >example <https://doi.org/10.15347/wjm/2018.001>)
> > > > > >- Original research articles that are not imported to Wikipedia
> > > > > (example
> > > > > ><
> > > > > >
> > > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Acute_gastrointestinal_bleeding_from_a_chronic_cause:_a_teaching_case_report
> > > > > > >
> > > > > >)
> > > > > >
> > > > > > *Proposal: WikiJournals as a new sister project
> > > > > > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiJournal>*
> > > > > >
> > > > > > From a Wikipedian point of view, this is a complementary system to
> > > > > Featured
> > > > > > article review, but bridging the gap with external experts
> > > > > > <
> > > https://

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiJournals: A proposal to become a new sister project

[John Erling Blad]

How do you handle lock down of articles? That is only listed authors should
write a given article, so you can't allow random user edit access as it is
today.

Jeblad

man. 3. jun. 2019, 04.16 skrev Thomas Shafee :

> Yes, we put together a little checklist back in round one (*link*
> <
> https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Notes_on_Plan_S_compliance_criteria
> >
> ).
>
> Initially there were a few items that are currently not achieved (e.g.
> JATS-compliant XML formatting). The revised Plan_S has reduced stringency
> and all the items that weren't hit happen to be optional. That being said,
> things like JATS-compliant XML and citation metadata would be valuable to
> implement anyway for machine readability.
>
> Thomas
>
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 04:53, James Heilman  wrote:
>
> > It already is Plan-S compliant :-)
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Licensing_and_rights
> >
> > Plan-S unfortunately is looking at allowing ND content.
> >
> > James
> >
> > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 8:14 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
> > thrapostibong...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Thomas
> > >
> > > Is it intended that the journals should be Plan-S compliant?
> > >
> > > Thrapostibongles
> > >
> > > On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 9:01 AM Thomas Shafee 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hello Wikipedians,
> > > >
> > > > Over the last few years, the WikiJournal User Group
> > > >  has been
> > > building
> > > > and testing a set of peer reviewed academic journals on a mediawiki
> > > > platform. The main types of articles are:
> > > >
> > > >- Existing Wikipedia articles submitted for external review and
> > > feedback
> > > >(example )
> > > >- From-scratch articles that, after review, are imported to
> > Wikipedia
> > > (
> > > >example )
> > > >- Original research articles that are not imported to Wikipedia
> > > (example
> > > ><
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Acute_gastrointestinal_bleeding_from_a_chronic_cause:_a_teaching_case_report
> > > > >
> > > >)
> > > >
> > > > *Proposal: WikiJournals as a new sister project
> > > > *
> > > >
> > > > From a Wikipedian point of view, this is a complementary system to
> > > Featured
> > > > article review, but bridging the gap with external experts
> > > > <
> https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Peer_reviewers
> > >,
> > > > implementing established scholarly practices
> > > > <
> > https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Ethics_statement
> > > >,
> > > > and generating citable, doi-linked publications
> > > > .
> > > >
> > > > Please take a look and support/oppose/comment!
> > > > All the best,
> > > > Thomas Shafee
> > > >
> > > > ps, We are attempting to improve awareness within the existing
> > wikimedia
> > > > community, so feel free to share with others.
> > > > ___
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> > > > Unsubscribe:
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> > > > 
> > > ___
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> > > 
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > James Heilman
> > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
> > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] AI Image Restoration

[John Erling Blad]

I've been playing with an idea that a a kind of batch script could be
applied to an image, and then the result of the processing becomes the
image to display, but the real image is not changed at all. Someting
like magick-script in a tag-function.[1] I have not checked how secure
it would be, but MediaWiki already use the ImageMagick package.

[1] https://imagemagick.org/script/magick-script.php


On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 10:40 AM Fæ  wrote:
>
> For Wikimedia Commons the issue of how to handle digital restorations
> has been discussed several times, there are no single solutions. The
> general position is that original images, such as very old glass plate
> prints from archives, should be preserved and displayed in their
> original state, but there is no harm in making available restorations
> as separate files that fairly and accurately represent the photograph
> and remove damage or flaws. The reuser or reader should never be in
> doubt that they are looking at a restoration rather than the original,
> and we have to keep in mind that we do not always know whether the
> reader's monitor, display device or printer may also adapt the
> saturation and brightness of the image.
>
> Though it is possible to do large batch changes for light levels,
> sharpening, colour correction and so on, these remain controversial if
> the original file is overwritten. This is especially true when an
> artwork has been photographed or scanned.
>
> Among recent on-wiki controversy is colorization of photographs,
> especially old black and white photographs. These may be interesting,
> and at times useful for illustration, but again the reader should be
> in no doubt that they are not looking at "reality" and as good
> practice it should always be easy for the reader to navigate to the
> unenhanced original.
>
> Fae
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>
> On Tue, 28 May 2019 at 02:23, John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > A quite common problem at all Wikimedia sites; we have a photo but the
> > quality is poor. An example is the old photo from the cabins at
> > Mørkedalen where a group of fighters hid out during the invasion of
> > Norway.[1]
> >
> > I've been using some manual tools to restore images, but it is very
> > slow and the result is often not very good. What if we could automate
> > the process? The work "Deep Image Prior"[2] could be a solution, it is
> > quite awesome, but it is a bit too difficult to configure for most
> > users.
> >
> > There are several such automated tools, or algorithms that can be
> > turned into automated tools, but the question is; do we want an
> > automated tool set, or do we want to keep on doing things manually?
> >
> > [1] https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skil%C3%B8perpatruljen_i_M%C3%B8rkedalen
> > [2] https://dmitryulyanov.github.io/deep_image_prior
> >
>
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[Wikimedia-l] AI Image Restoration

[John Erling Blad]

A quite common problem at all Wikimedia sites; we have a photo but the
quality is poor. An example is the old photo from the cabins at
Mørkedalen where a group of fighters hid out during the invasion of
Norway.[1]

I've been using some manual tools to restore images, but it is very
slow and the result is often not very good. What if we could automate
the process? The work "Deep Image Prior"[2] could be a solution, it is
quite awesome, but it is a bit too difficult to configure for most
users.

There are several such automated tools, or algorithms that can be
turned into automated tools, but the question is; do we want an
automated tool set, or do we want to keep on doing things manually?

[1] https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skil%C3%B8perpatruljen_i_M%C3%B8rkedalen
[2] https://dmitryulyanov.github.io/deep_image_prior

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] If we had proper language models…

[John Erling Blad]

Perhaps I'll explain this a bit better…

Words can be converted into a vector representation by a word2vec
algorithm [1]. After conversion words will be a point in a high
dimensional space. Relations between words will then be vectors
between such points. Similar relations (or related relations) can be
found by operations on such vectors, or sets of vectors. Often this is
visualized as queen is to king as woman is to man, and similar
relations.

Some relations is quite obvious and common, but some relations simply
does not exist. If we can make a probability model over relations (a
regression model) then we can estimate the probability of observing a
specific relation, and thus be able to say "this does not seem to be a
probable word". (Typically one of several sequence models ("Recurrent
neural network" [2]) would be used for the estimation, and triplet
loss [3] for the training phase.)

It would be like having a "spell right"-metric for text fragments.

Note that this isn't quite as easy as described, as words might have
multiple interpretations and that makes it difficult to build a stable
vector representation. An example is "car" which is something you
typically drive on a road, but it can also be part of a train, or a
toy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplet_loss

On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 2:55 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> Microsoft has unveiled an idea about a grammar and style tool for
> Word. [1] I proposed something similar for detecting problematic
> grammatical constructs in the content translation tools.[2] It is a
> couple of years ago now, and I closed the task.
>
> [1] 
> https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/06/microsoft-debuts-ideas-in-word-a-grammar-and-style-suggestions-tool-powered-by-ai/
> [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T162525

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[Wikimedia-l] If we had proper language models…

[John Erling Blad]

Microsoft has unveiled an idea about a grammar and style tool for
Word. [1] I proposed something similar for detecting problematic
grammatical constructs in the content translation tools.[2] It is a
couple of years ago now, and I closed the task.

[1] 
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/06/microsoft-debuts-ideas-in-word-a-grammar-and-style-suggestions-tool-powered-by-ai/
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T162525

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thank you and farewell

[John Erling Blad]

To be an organization so devoted to knowledge, Wikimedia as such (the
projects communities included) knows very little about epistemology. A
collection of mere facts, even referenced, is nothing more than
information.


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

To quote what you said

> > I think professional photographers should have their account confirmed by
> > OTRS.

This is not about previous publishing, this is about the person
publishing a photo.

Problems with previous publishing is not special in any way for
professional photographers vs amateur photographers. If a photo is
previously published it _may_ be an indication of a copyvio, but it
can also clarify the matter as the previous published photo may carry
a byline stating the name of the photographer.
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 6:44 AM Yann Forget  wrote:
>
> The issue is not in that way.
> If you published an image exclusively on Commons, then no problem.
> If you first publish an image outside Commons, how do we know that you are
> the author?
> OK, there may be some factors to prove that (consistency of EXIF data,
> etc.), but in the absence of EXIF data, we the issue remain.
>
> Regards,
> Yann
> Jai Jagat 2020 Grand March Coordinator
> https://www.jaijagat2020.org/
> +91-74 34 93 33 58 (also WhatsApp)
>
>
>
> Le mar. 14 mai 2019 à 10:00, John Erling Blad  a écrit :
>
> > Again; what is different between me as a photographer taking pictures for a
> > newspaper and me as a photograper taking pictures for Commons? Is it the
> > name written om the lens? The shoes I'm wearing?
> >
> > There are no difference, this is a fallacy.
> >
> > John Erling Blad
> > /jeblad
> >
> >
> > tir. 14. mai 2019, 05.50 skrev Yann Forget :
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Currently, we require a confirmation via OTRS if an image was previously
> > > published elsewhere before being uploaded to Commons.
> > > I think professional photographers should have their account confirmed by
> > > OTRS.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Yann Forget
> > > Jai Jagat 2020 Grand March Coordinator
> > > https://www.jaijagat2020.org/
> > > +91-74 34 93 33 58 (also WhatsApp)
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Le lun. 13 mai 2019 à 16:56, John Erling Blad  a
> > écrit :
> > >
> > > > I can imagine a bot comparing photos found by Google (ie. comparing
> > > > hashes) but not a system extracting some kind of unique feature that
> > > > says an image is a copyright violation. So how do you imagine ORES
> > > > being used for copyright violations? I can't see how a copyright
> > > > violation would have any kind of feature that is exclusive? The
> > > > argument is quite simple; I as a photographer for a newspaper could
> > > > take the exact same pictures as I as an amateur photographer. (I have
> > > > photographed a lot for various newspapers.) Using the same equipment,
> > > > and me being me, what is different?
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:21 PM Amir Sarabadani 
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > IMO commons need either a Clue Bot NG for new uploads or ores support
> > > for
> > > > > images that might be copyright violation, or both.
> > > > >
> > > > > Best
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:10 PM Yaroslav Blanter 
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Just the active community itself is too small, compared with the
> > > > amount of
> > > > > > material it has to deal with.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Cheers
> > > > > > Yaroslav
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta <
> > > > benjaminik...@gmail.com>
> > > > > > wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Is the shortage of admins due to a lack of people willing or
> > > capable
> > > > to
> > > > > > do
> > > > > > > the job, or increasing difficulty in obtaining the bit?
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > On May 12, 2019, at 3:55 AM, Tomasz Ganicz 
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > Well, Actually, at the moment it looks they are all undeleted.
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > The good habit - which I was keeping when organizing several
> > > > > > GLAM-related
> > > >

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

Again; what is different between me as a photographer taking pictures for a
newspaper and me as a photograper taking pictures for Commons? Is it the
name written om the lens? The shoes I'm wearing?

There are no difference, this is a fallacy.

John Erling Blad
/jeblad


tir. 14. mai 2019, 05.50 skrev Yann Forget :

> Hi,
>
> Currently, we require a confirmation via OTRS if an image was previously
> published elsewhere before being uploaded to Commons.
> I think professional photographers should have their account confirmed by
> OTRS.
>
> Regards,
> Yann Forget
> Jai Jagat 2020 Grand March Coordinator
> https://www.jaijagat2020.org/
> +91-74 34 93 33 58 (also WhatsApp)
>
>
>
> Le lun. 13 mai 2019 à 16:56, John Erling Blad  a écrit :
>
> > I can imagine a bot comparing photos found by Google (ie. comparing
> > hashes) but not a system extracting some kind of unique feature that
> > says an image is a copyright violation. So how do you imagine ORES
> > being used for copyright violations? I can't see how a copyright
> > violation would have any kind of feature that is exclusive? The
> > argument is quite simple; I as a photographer for a newspaper could
> > take the exact same pictures as I as an amateur photographer. (I have
> > photographed a lot for various newspapers.) Using the same equipment,
> > and me being me, what is different?
> >
> > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:21 PM Amir Sarabadani 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > IMO commons need either a Clue Bot NG for new uploads or ores support
> for
> > > images that might be copyright violation, or both.
> > >
> > > Best
> > >
> > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:10 PM Yaroslav Blanter 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Just the active community itself is too small, compared with the
> > amount of
> > > > material it has to deal with.
> > > >
> > > > Cheers
> > > > Yaroslav
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta <
> > benjaminik...@gmail.com>
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Is the shortage of admins due to a lack of people willing or
> capable
> > to
> > > > do
> > > > > the job, or increasing difficulty in obtaining the bit?
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On May 12, 2019, at 3:55 AM, Tomasz Ganicz 
> > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Well, Actually, at the moment it looks they are all undeleted.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > The good habit - which I was keeping when organizing several
> > > > GLAM-related
> > > > > > mass uploads - was to create on Commons project page describing
> > what it
> > > > > is
> > > > > > intended to be uploaded, preferably in English. Then you can
> > create a
> > > > > > project template to mark all uploads with them.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Despite practical issue of avoiding unnecessary clashes with
> > Common's
> > > > > > admins - creating template and project page helps to promote you
> > > > project
> > > > > > across Wikimedia communities and may inspire others to do
> something
> > > > > similar.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Commons is indeed quite hostile environment for uploaders, but on
> > the
> > > > > other
> > > > > > hand it is constantly flooded by hundreds  of copyright violating
> > > > files a
> > > > > > day:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > See the list from just one day:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > >
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/2019/05/01
> > > > > >
> > > > > > so this hostility works both ways - Common's admins have to cope
> > with
> > > > > > aggressive hostile copyright violators every day, and after some
> > time -
> > > > > > decide to leave or became being hostile themselves... and the
> other
> > > > issue
> > > > > > is decreasing number of active admins and OTRS agents.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I think - sooner or later - a

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

Some years ago I did a quite simplified analysis of the number of
active contributors, and normalized the number against the number of
people wit internet connections for the respective language groups.
The relative number was pretty similar for all languages from similar
cultural groups. I suspect that for a given group, or project, there
is a limit on the relative number of contributors and we can't get
above it without changing the project somehow. Another indication that
there is a "crowdsource constant" is the trend themselves on
contributors at the individual projects, they have been stable (or
near stable) for a very long time. (Yes they drop somewhat, I know
that!)

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 8:09 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
 wrote:
>
> A good question to ask would be why the admin group is not growing. And maybe 
> (maybe) we can find a common answer to both problems pointed here.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

Trying to explain European copyright to Americans can be
quite hard… 

;)

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 6:07 AM Yann Forget  wrote:
>
> Hi James,
>
> Of course. More admins would lesser the work charge, and it would be great.
> We specially appreciate admins with multi-language capabilities, as it is a
> multilangual project.
> Of course, comprehensive knowledge of copyright is needed.
> That is complex, but it can be learnt.
>
> Regards,
> Yann
> Jai Jagat 2020 Grand March Coordinator
> https://www.jaijagat2020.org/
> +91-74 34 93 33 58 (also WhatsApp)
>
>
>
> Le dim. 12 mai 2019 à 19:01, James Heilman  a écrit :
>
> > It is hard to get the admin bit there aswell. Is Commons interested in
> > having more admins?
> >
> > James
> >
> > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 5:41 AM Fæ  wrote:
> >
> > > A couple of years ago a proposed project was for the WMF to pay for
> > > access to the Google image matching API access so we could run a
> > > copyvio bot on the live new uploads list. Such a bot would not be
> > > terribly hard to get working, and would be a great experiment to see
> > > if this aspect of the more boring side of sysop tools could be
> > > reduced.[1]
> > >
> > > Not specifically advocating auto-deletion, but daily housekeeping
> > > image matches to highly likely copyrighted categories would make mass
> > > housekeeping very easy.
> > >
> > > A separate old chestnut was my proposal to introduce systemic image
> > > hashes, which neatly show "close" image matches.[2] With a Commons hat
> > > on, such a project would be of far more immediate pragmatic use than
> > > mobile-related and structured data-related projects that seem to suck
> > > up all the oxygen and volunteer time available.
> > >
> > > Note that the history of these project/funding ideas is so long, that
> > > several of the most experienced long term volunteers that were
> > > originally interested have since retired. Without some positive short
> > > term encouragement, not only do these ideas never reach the useful
> > > experiment stage, but the volunteers involved simply fade away.
> > >
> > > Links
> > > 1.
> > >
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2016/02#Google_has_opened_an_API_for_image_recognition
> > > 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/Imagehash
> > >
> > > Fae
> > >
> > > On Sun, 12 May 2019 at 12:21, Amir Sarabadani 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > IMO commons need either a Clue Bot NG for new uploads or ores support
> > for
> > > > images that might be copyright violation, or both.
> > > >
> > > > Best
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:10 PM Yaroslav Blanter 
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Just the active community itself is too small, compared with the
> > > amount of
> > > > > material it has to deal with.
> > > > >
> > > > > Cheers
> > > > > Yaroslav
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta <
> > > benjaminik...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Is the shortage of admins due to a lack of people willing or
> > capable
> > > to
> > > > > do
> > > > > > the job, or increasing difficulty in obtaining the bit?
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On May 12, 2019, at 3:55 AM, Tomasz Ganicz 
> > > wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > Well, Actually, at the moment it looks they are all undeleted.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > The good habit - which I was keeping when organizing several
> > > > > GLAM-related
> > > > > > > mass uploads - was to create on Commons project page describing
> > > what it
> > > > > > is
> > > > > > > intended to be uploaded, preferably in English. Then you can
> > > create a
> > > > > > > project template to mark all uploads with them.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Despite practical issue of avoiding unnecessary clashes with
> > > Common's
> > > > > > > admins - creating template and project page helps to promote you
> > > > > project
> > > > > > > across Wikimedia communities and may inspire others to do
> > something
> > > > > > similar.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Commons is indeed quite hostile environment for uploaders, but on
> > > the
> > > > > > other
> > > > > > > hand it is constantly flooded by hundreds  of copyright violating
> > > > > files a
> > > > > > > day:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > See the list from just one day:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > >
> > > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/2019/05/01
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > so this hostility works both ways - Common's admins have to cope
> > > with
> > > > > > > aggressive hostile copyright violators every day, and after some
> > > time -
> > > > > > > decide to leave or became being hostile themselves... and the
> > other
> > > > > issue
> > > > > > > is decreasing number of active admins and OTRS agents.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > I think - sooner or later - all this system - uploads - 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

This is wrong: "The upload system allow you to upload something if you
are the author. Period."

The system as it is now will allow anyone to upload a file given (s)he
has the necessary rights. That does not imply the uploader being the
author of the material.

Note that verifying whether the uploaded material already exist out on
the web must be done before the file is made public, otherwise any
attempt on detecting a copyviolation will fail. That would imply that
a copyvio algorithm must be automated. The questionable material could
still be uploaded, but then a permission should be forwarded to OTRS.
Also, a report from the copyvio algorithm should be stored with the
uploaded material, as it is impossible to retrace the detection after
the material is made public.

On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 4:23 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
 wrote:
>
> As I am the author of the post, some remarks:
>
>   *   Commons is, indeed, the only [cloud] storage for file in most of the 
> Wikipedias. Making an accusation of using Commons as a storage place is 
> unfair and nonsense.
>   *   Communication could be better, of course, but we don't have to think on 
> experienced editors and wikimedians, but on people we are trying to convince 
> to upload to the Commons and find this burden. They don't know how to 
> communicate and why they must do it.
>   *   The upload system allow you to upload something if you are the author. 
> Period.
>   *   Claiming that something is a derivative work without saying which is 
> the original work is not a good practice.
>   *   Of course, commons volunteers are few, and they have a great job-queue. 
> But outreach volunteers are less, and a project like this can take a whole 
> year of volunteer work.
>   *   After all the victim-blaming seen on this discussion no one was able to 
> point to a page where the procedure was clear for everyone.
>
> Let's hope we can follow with this project next year and we will have less 
> problems.
>
> Cheers
>
> Galder
> 
> From: Wikimedia-l  on behalf of Vi 
> to 
> Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2019 3:35 PM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach
>
> I wonder wheter local sysops could be allowed to delete/undelete images on
> commons in order to reduce workload. Most risky commons' uploads come from
> cw-upload, allow local sysops to handle them could work.
>
> Vito
>
> Il giorno dom 12 mag 2019 alle ore 15:31 James Heilman 
> ha scritto:
>
> > It is hard to get the admin bit there aswell. Is Commons interested in
> > having more admins?
> >
> > James
> >
> > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 5:41 AM Fæ  wrote:
> >
> > > A couple of years ago a proposed project was for the WMF to pay for
> > > access to the Google image matching API access so we could run a
> > > copyvio bot on the live new uploads list. Such a bot would not be
> > > terribly hard to get working, and would be a great experiment to see
> > > if this aspect of the more boring side of sysop tools could be
> > > reduced.[1]
> > >
> > > Not specifically advocating auto-deletion, but daily housekeeping
> > > image matches to highly likely copyrighted categories would make mass
> > > housekeeping very easy.
> > >
> > > A separate old chestnut was my proposal to introduce systemic image
> > > hashes, which neatly show "close" image matches.[2] With a Commons hat
> > > on, such a project would be of far more immediate pragmatic use than
> > > mobile-related and structured data-related projects that seem to suck
> > > up all the oxygen and volunteer time available.
> > >
> > > Note that the history of these project/funding ideas is so long, that
> > > several of the most experienced long term volunteers that were
> > > originally interested have since retired. Without some positive short
> > > term encouragement, not only do these ideas never reach the useful
> > > experiment stage, but the volunteers involved simply fade away.
> > >
> > > Links
> > > 1.
> > >
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2016/02#Google_has_opened_an_API_for_image_recognition
> > > 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/Imagehash
> > >
> > > Fae
> > >
> > > On Sun, 12 May 2019 at 12:21, Amir Sarabadani 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > IMO commons need either a Clue Bot NG for new uploads or ores support
> > for
> > > > images that might be copyright violation, or both.
> > > >
> > > > Best
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:10 PM Yaroslav Blanter 
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Just the active community itself is too small, compared with the
> > > amount of
> > > > > material it has to deal with.
> > > > >
> > > > > Cheers
> > > > > Yaroslav
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta <
> > > benjaminik...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Is the shortage of admins due to a lack of people willing or
> > capable
> > > to
> > > > > do
> > > > > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

I can imagine a bot comparing photos found by Google (ie. comparing
hashes) but not a system extracting some kind of unique feature that
says an image is a copyright violation. So how do you imagine ORES
being used for copyright violations? I can't see how a copyright
violation would have any kind of feature that is exclusive? The
argument is quite simple; I as a photographer for a newspaper could
take the exact same pictures as I as an amateur photographer. (I have
photographed a lot for various newspapers.) Using the same equipment,
and me being me, what is different?

On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:21 PM Amir Sarabadani  wrote:
>
> IMO commons need either a Clue Bot NG for new uploads or ores support for
> images that might be copyright violation, or both.
>
> Best
>
> On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:10 PM Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
>
> > Just the active community itself is too small, compared with the amount of
> > material it has to deal with.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Yaroslav
> >
> > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta 
> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Is the shortage of admins due to a lack of people willing or capable to
> > do
> > > the job, or increasing difficulty in obtaining the bit?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On May 12, 2019, at 3:55 AM, Tomasz Ganicz  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Well, Actually, at the moment it looks they are all undeleted.
> > > >
> > > > The good habit - which I was keeping when organizing several
> > GLAM-related
> > > > mass uploads - was to create on Commons project page describing what it
> > > is
> > > > intended to be uploaded, preferably in English. Then you can create a
> > > > project template to mark all uploads with them.
> > > >
> > > > See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships
> > > >
> > > > Despite practical issue of avoiding unnecessary clashes with Common's
> > > > admins - creating template and project page helps to promote you
> > project
> > > > across Wikimedia communities and may inspire others to do something
> > > similar.
> > > >
> > > > Commons is indeed quite hostile environment for uploaders, but on the
> > > other
> > > > hand it is constantly flooded by hundreds  of copyright violating
> > files a
> > > > day:
> > > >
> > > > See the list from just one day:
> > > >
> > > >
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/2019/05/01
> > > >
> > > > so this hostility works both ways - Common's admins have to cope with
> > > > aggressive hostile copyright violators every day, and after some time -
> > > > decide to leave or became being hostile themselves... and the other
> > issue
> > > > is decreasing number of active admins and OTRS agents.
> > > >
> > > > I think - sooner or later - all this system - uploads - screening
> > uploads
> > > > by admins, and OTRS agreements - needs deep rethinking.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > niedz., 12 maj 2019 o 10:48 Mister Thrapostibongles <
> > > > thrapostibong...@gmail.com> napisał(a):
> > > >
> > > >> Hello all,
> > > >>
> > > >> There seems to be a dispute between the Outreach and the Commons
> > > components
> > > >> of The Community, judging by the article "Wikimedia Commons: a highly
> > > >> hostile place for multimedia students contributions" at the Education
> > > >> Newsletter
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > >
> > https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/News/April_2019/Wikimedia_Commons:_a_highly_hostile_place_for_multimedia_students_contributions
> > > >>
> > > >> As far as I can understand it, some students on an Outreach project
> > > >> uploaded some rather well-made video material, and comeone on Commons
> > > >> deleted them because they appeared to well-made to be student projects
> > > and
> > > >> so concluded they were copyright violations.  But some rather odd
> > > remarks
> > > >> were made "Commons has to fight the endless stream of uploaded
> > > copyrighted
> > > >> content on behalf of a headquarters in San Francisco that doesn't
> > care."
> > > >> and
> > > >> "you have regarded Commons as little more than free cloud storage for
> > > >> images you intend to use on Wikipedia ".
> > > >>
> > > >> Perhaps the Foundation needs to resolve this dispute?
> > > >>
> > > >> Thrapostibongles
> > > >> ___
> > > >> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > >> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> > ,
> > > >> 
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
> > > > http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
> > > > http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dispute between Common and Outreach

[John Erling Blad]

I have proposed use of local sensitive hashing algorithms for at least
three different purposes in the past. All being turned down. Probably
it is due to LSHs being difficult to understand, and not to forget it
is a fairly bit of fighting over what is and whats not a "real" LSH.
In the past there have been a proposal to remove the SHA-1 digest for
the revision, which I guess shows how hard it is to argue about the
necessity of hashes.

If we want to do LSH for media, then we should probably check which
DCT gives best performance. In particular we should check out whether
there are methods that gives smaller footprints and faster calculation
and comparison. Media streams can also be fingerprinted by using clip
points. Also, as DCT is closely related to Fourier transforms (it is a
real component Fourier transform), it could also be interesting to
checking out cepstrum based transforms.

Related to this is also face recognition, but then we must discuss
various methods for generating eigenfaces. Not sure if this is the
proper forum for that!

On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:41 PM Fæ  wrote:
>
> A couple of years ago a proposed project was for the WMF to pay for
> access to the Google image matching API access so we could run a
> copyvio bot on the live new uploads list. Such a bot would not be
> terribly hard to get working, and would be a great experiment to see
> if this aspect of the more boring side of sysop tools could be
> reduced.[1]
>
> Not specifically advocating auto-deletion, but daily housekeeping
> image matches to highly likely copyrighted categories would make mass
> housekeeping very easy.
>
> A separate old chestnut was my proposal to introduce systemic image
> hashes, which neatly show "close" image matches.[2] With a Commons hat
> on, such a project would be of far more immediate pragmatic use than
> mobile-related and structured data-related projects that seem to suck
> up all the oxygen and volunteer time available.
>
> Note that the history of these project/funding ideas is so long, that
> several of the most experienced long term volunteers that were
> originally interested have since retired. Without some positive short
> term encouragement, not only do these ideas never reach the useful
> experiment stage, but the volunteers involved simply fade away.
>
> Links
> 1. 
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2016/02#Google_has_opened_an_API_for_image_recognition
> 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/Imagehash
>
> Fae
>
> On Sun, 12 May 2019 at 12:21, Amir Sarabadani  wrote:
> >
> > IMO commons need either a Clue Bot NG for new uploads or ores support for
> > images that might be copyright violation, or both.
> >
> > Best
> >
> > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:10 PM Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
> >
> > > Just the active community itself is too small, compared with the amount of
> > > material it has to deal with.
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > > Yaroslav
> > >
> > > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 1:07 PM Benjamin Ikuta 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Is the shortage of admins due to a lack of people willing or capable to
> > > do
> > > > the job, or increasing difficulty in obtaining the bit?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On May 12, 2019, at 3:55 AM, Tomasz Ganicz  wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Well, Actually, at the moment it looks they are all undeleted.
> > > > >
> > > > > The good habit - which I was keeping when organizing several
> > > GLAM-related
> > > > > mass uploads - was to create on Commons project page describing what 
> > > > > it
> > > > is
> > > > > intended to be uploaded, preferably in English. Then you can create a
> > > > > project template to mark all uploads with them.
> > > > >
> > > > > See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships
> > > > >
> > > > > Despite practical issue of avoiding unnecessary clashes with Common's
> > > > > admins - creating template and project page helps to promote you
> > > project
> > > > > across Wikimedia communities and may inspire others to do something
> > > > similar.
> > > > >
> > > > > Commons is indeed quite hostile environment for uploaders, but on the
> > > > other
> > > > > hand it is constantly flooded by hundreds  of copyright violating
> > > files a
> > > > > day:
> > > > >
> > > > > See the list from just one day:
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/2019/05/01
> > > > >
> > > > > so this hostility works both ways - Common's admins have to cope with
> > > > > aggressive hostile copyright violators every day, and after some time 
> > > > > -
> > > > > decide to leave or became being hostile themselves... and the other
> > > issue
> > > > > is decreasing number of active admins and OTRS agents.
> > > > >
> > > > > I think - sooner or later - all this system - uploads - screening
> > > uploads
> > > > > by admins, and OTRS agreements - needs deep rethinking.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > niedz., 12 maj 2019 o 10:48 Mister 

[Wikimedia-l] Search strings in "cite"

[John Erling Blad]

Anyone noticed the terse tech notice in november?

"When you edit with the visual editor you can use the "Automatic"
citation tab. This helps you generate citations. You will now be able
to write plain text citations or the title of a journal article or a
book in this tab. This will search the Crossref and WorldCat databases
and add the top result." [1]

This is absolutely great and should have been posted in big friendly
letters as a site notice!

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198567

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[John Erling Blad]

We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead
of using countries. That will give a better representation of large
countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic
groups.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
>
> > Hoi,
> > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> > to be of interest [1] ?
> >
>
> Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
>
> 1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
> Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
> 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to some
> improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
> engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
>
> 2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people often
> search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no
> articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program
>
> 3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
> language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You can
> see a sample here:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
> . I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time soon.
>
> 4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
> that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
>
> 5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better than
> nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool,
> rather than just by language. It's documented at
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is that
> the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India,
> the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The English
> Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it is
> sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's
> also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages
> other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of
> course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages of
> these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help
> people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be
> useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these
> languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia articles
> in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia articles in
> Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be implemented
> some day.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
> 

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Bounties…

[John Erling Blad]

I believe this kind of statement ("at the moment paid editing is
universally regarded very negatively in virtually all projects") hurt
the movement more than anything else for the moment, as it blocks
progress on a lot of important fields without any real arguments to
back it up. It is the fundamental flaw behind "Terms of use/Paid
contributions amendment"[1] It is just a bunch of feelings and
hearsay. We have shot ourselves in the collective foot by blocking the
most useful tool we have.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/Paid_contributions_amendment

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 5:28 PM Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
>
> Whatever the reasoning is, I think we should accept that at the moment paid
> editing is universally regarded very negatively in virtually all projects.
> Non-monetary prizes for competitions may or may not be ok, everything else
> is most likely not considered to be ok even if does not explicitly
> contradict to any policies.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 5:07 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > I was thinking about actually bounties, like in bug bounties from
> > larger software vendors. We have some "bugs", like spellchecking,
> > which is pretty easy to quantify, and that can be done as part of
> > bounties with cash. Yes, the ugly word, paid editing! OMG!
> >
> > But quite frankly, why should we not? ¢1 per fixed single word typo
> > that leads to one-less spelling error? Perhaps even $1 per
> > spellchecked page? Delayed one week to see if anyone reverts the
> > edits?
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 4:17 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
> >  wrote:
> > >
> > > In the Basque wikipedia we are doing monthly contests on different
> > topics, and some of them are focused on quality (i.e. adding references and
> > images). There are some prices every month, usually books or thing related
> > to technology. And people usually like to participate for the fun, and for
> > the prize.
> > > 
> > > From: Wikimedia-l  on behalf
> > of Benjamin Lees 
> > > Sent: Friday, January 25, 2019 5:14 AM
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Bounties…
> > >
> > > It's interesting that you chose spellchecking as your example.  On the
> > > English Wikipedia, I tend to see that as an activity that some people
> > > actually do find fun (or relaxing).  Plus, spelling errors (or perceived
> > > spelling errors[1]) are something that unregistered users really like
> > > fixing.  But maybe that varies significantly across language editions.
> > >
> > > In any event, spelling errors are probably the case where eventualism is
> > > most appropriate.  It is rare that someone will be misinformed because of
> > > spelling mistakes, and they serve a useful signaling function in making
> > it
> > > clear that a given piece of content has probably not undergone peer
> > > review.  And rather than driving people away, they tend to draw them
> > > in—Cunningham's law[2] never fails.
> > >
> > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ENGVAR
> > > [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 6:55 PM John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Both in Wikipedia and other parts of the Wikimedia-universe there are
> > > > a lot of jobs that should be done, but are not so popular. Because
> > > > they are not done, people get tired and backs away from whatever they
> > > > are doing.
> > > >
> > > > I could give several examples, but lets say spellchecking. It is not
> > > > fun doing spellchecking, even if you are spellchecking something
> > > > written by a professor. Instead of doing spellchecking you do
> > > > something else, like poking around in some code, or write about
> > > > Pokemon. While you do so the professor gets a bit annoyed over the not
> > > > so perfect article, and starts to wonder what happen to the crowd in
> > > > crowdsourcing.
> > > >
> > > > Somewhere along the way the it became so bad to talk about anything
> > > > except the pure wikipedian sitting on top of his pillar with a book
> > > > and a computer, writing articles in solitude, that we completely
> > > > missed the opportunities to get a much larger momentum.
> > > >
> > > > The Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia has over a half a million articles.
> > > >

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Bounties…

[John Erling Blad]

I was thinking about actually bounties, like in bug bounties from
larger software vendors. We have some "bugs", like spellchecking,
which is pretty easy to quantify, and that can be done as part of
bounties with cash. Yes, the ugly word, paid editing! OMG!

But quite frankly, why should we not? ¢1 per fixed single word typo
that leads to one-less spelling error? Perhaps even $1 per
spellchecked page? Delayed one week to see if anyone reverts the
edits?

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 4:17 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
 wrote:
>
> In the Basque wikipedia we are doing monthly contests on different topics, 
> and some of them are focused on quality (i.e. adding references and images). 
> There are some prices every month, usually books or thing related to 
> technology. And people usually like to participate for the fun, and for the 
> prize.
> 
> From: Wikimedia-l  on behalf of 
> Benjamin Lees 
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2019 5:14 AM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Bounties…
>
> It's interesting that you chose spellchecking as your example.  On the
> English Wikipedia, I tend to see that as an activity that some people
> actually do find fun (or relaxing).  Plus, spelling errors (or perceived
> spelling errors[1]) are something that unregistered users really like
> fixing.  But maybe that varies significantly across language editions.
>
> In any event, spelling errors are probably the case where eventualism is
> most appropriate.  It is rare that someone will be misinformed because of
> spelling mistakes, and they serve a useful signaling function in making it
> clear that a given piece of content has probably not undergone peer
> review.  And rather than driving people away, they tend to draw them
> in—Cunningham's law[2] never fails.
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ENGVAR
> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 6:55 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Both in Wikipedia and other parts of the Wikimedia-universe there are
> > a lot of jobs that should be done, but are not so popular. Because
> > they are not done, people get tired and backs away from whatever they
> > are doing.
> >
> > I could give several examples, but lets say spellchecking. It is not
> > fun doing spellchecking, even if you are spellchecking something
> > written by a professor. Instead of doing spellchecking you do
> > something else, like poking around in some code, or write about
> > Pokemon. While you do so the professor gets a bit annoyed over the not
> > so perfect article, and starts to wonder what happen to the crowd in
> > crowdsourcing.
> >
> > Somewhere along the way the it became so bad to talk about anything
> > except the pure wikipedian sitting on top of his pillar with a book
> > and a computer, writing articles in solitude, that we completely
> > missed the opportunities to get a much larger momentum.
> >
> > The Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia has over a half a million articles.
> > About 10 % lack sources. Nearly all of them has spelling errors. It is
> > nothing unusual about this.
> >
> > Could we use bounties to get some momentum?
> >
> > John Erling Blad
> > /jeblad
> >
> > ___
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[Wikimedia-l] Bounties…

[John Erling Blad]

Both in Wikipedia and other parts of the Wikimedia-universe there are
a lot of jobs that should be done, but are not so popular. Because
they are not done, people get tired and backs away from whatever they
are doing.

I could give several examples, but lets say spellchecking. It is not
fun doing spellchecking, even if you are spellchecking something
written by a professor. Instead of doing spellchecking you do
something else, like poking around in some code, or write about
Pokemon. While you do so the professor gets a bit annoyed over the not
so perfect article, and starts to wonder what happen to the crowd in
crowdsourcing.

Somewhere along the way the it became so bad to talk about anything
except the pure wikipedian sitting on top of his pillar with a book
and a computer, writing articles in solitude, that we completely
missed the opportunities to get a much larger momentum.

The Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia has over a half a million articles.
About 10 % lack sources. Nearly all of them has spelling errors. It is
nothing unusual about this.

Could we use bounties to get some momentum?

John Erling Blad
/jeblad

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[Wikimedia-l] Captioning Wikidata items?

[John Erling Blad]

Just a weird idea.

It is very interesting how neural nets can caption images. Quite
interesting. It is done by building a state-model of the image, that is
feed into a kind of neural net (RNN) and that net (a black box) will
transform the state-model into running text. In some cases the neural net
is steered. That is called an attention control, and it creates
relationship between parts in the image.

Swap out the image wit an item, and a virtually identical setup can
generate captions for items. The caption for an item is whats called the
description in Wikidata. It is also the first sentence with a lead-in in
Wikipedia articles. It is possible to steer the attention, that is to tell
the network what items should be used, and thus the later sentences will be
meaningful.

What that means is that we could create meaningful stub entries for the
article placeholder, that is the "AboutTopic" special page. We can't
automate this for very small projects, but somewhere between small and mid
sized languages it will start to make sense.

To make this work we need some very special knowledge, which we probably
don't have, like how to turn an item into a state-model by using the highly
specialized rdf2vec algorithm (hello Copenhagen) and verifying the stateful
language model (hello Helsinki and Tromsø).

I wonder if the only real problems are what do the community want, and what
is the acceptable error limit.

John Erling Blad
/jeblad
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[Wikimedia-l] JSONstat

[John Erling Blad]

I said it before (8. Aug. 2015 on Wikidata-l) we should have a way to
include statistics in the JSONstat format. The list of bureaus publishing
in this format is increasing.

National Institute for Statistics of Italy <http://apistat.istat.it/?q=help>,
Statistics Norway <https://data.ssb.no/api/?lang=en>, UK’s Office for
National Statistics <https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/api/v01/help>, Statistics
Sweden
<https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/about-the-website-and-terms-of-use/open-data-api/api-for-the-statistical-database/>,
Statistics Denmark
<https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/statistikbanken/api>, Statistics
Greenland <https://bank.stat.gl/pxweb/en/Greenland/>, Statistics Finland
<https://pxnet2.stat.fi/api1.html>, Instituto Galego de Estatística
<https://www.ige.eu/web/mostrar_paxina.jsp?paxina=004015=gl>, Central
Statistics Office of Ireland <https://www.cso.ie/webserviceclient/>, United
Nations Economic Commission for Europe <http://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en>,
Eurostat
<https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/json-and-unicode-web-services/about-this-service>,
Statistics Iceland <https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/>, Statistics
Faroe Islands <https://statbank.hagstova.fo/pxweb/en/H2/>, Statistics and
Research Åland <https://pxweb.asub.ax/PXWeb/pxweb/en/Statistik/>, Swedish
Board of Agriculture
<http://statistik.sjv.se/PXWeb/pxweb/sv/Jordbruksverkets%20statistikdatabas/>,
Statistical Institute of the Balearic Islands <https://ibestat.caib.es/>, Swiss
Federal Statistical Office <https://www.pxweb.bfs.admin.ch/pxweb/en/>, Croatian
Bureau of Statistics <https://www.dzs.hr/default_e.htm>, Statistical
Committee of the Republic of Armenia
<http://armstatbank.am/pxweb/en/ArmStatBank/>, State Statistical Office of
the Republic of Macedonia
<http://www.stat.gov.mk/OtvoreniPodatociApi_en.aspx>, Basque Institute of
Statistics <http://en.eustat.eus/bancopx/english/indice.html>

Note also the grant proposal
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Import_and_visualize_census_data>
.

John Erling Blad
/jeblad
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] 2 millions articles for the French Wikipedia

[John Erling Blad]

Congratulations from Norway!

*NOTICE: This message is not confidential or legally privileged in any way!
;)

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 6:14 PM Eileen Hershenov 
wrote:

> Congratulations
>
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 1:36 AM Thierry Coudray  wrote:
>
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > La grande nouvelle du jour / the big news today : the French Wikipedia
> > reached two millions articles a few hours ago  !
> >
> > The fr.wp community has written a press release for this milestone with
> > subpages for more explanations and get new people to edit WP.
> > and, off course, a commemorative logo community will be displayed.
> >
> > Merci à tous les contributeurs / Thanks for all the editors.
> >
> >
> > https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spécial:Statistiques
> >
> >
> >
> https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Deux_millions_d'articles_en_français
> >
> >
> > --
> > Thierry
> > ___
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>
> --
> Eileen B. Hershenov
> General Counsel and Secretary
> Wikimedia Foundation
> 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
> <
> https://maps.google.com/?q=1+Montgomery+Street,+Suite+1600+%0D+San+Francisco,+CA+94104=gmail=g
> >
> San Francisco, CA 94104
> <
> https://maps.google.com/?q=1+Montgomery+Street,+Suite+1600+%0D+San+Francisco,+CA+94104=gmail=g
> >
> (Licensed in New York; applying for California Registered In-House Counsel
> status)
> ehershe...@wikimedia.org
> (US) 415-483-6676
>
> *NOTICE: This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you
> have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
> mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation and for legal/ethical
> reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
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> on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Time to simplify the Bureaucracy ?

[John Erling Blad]

I wonder if some of the problem is that we have made a mash-up of policies
and guidelines on the same pages, thereby making it very hard for newcomers
to figure out what they must know and all the stuff that is simply nice to
know. Take a look at Verifiability at enwiki. [1] How much of this is
really a policy? The whole policy is in the nutshell template!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 5:55 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> Hi Zubin,
>
> I'd like to respond to this in multiple ways.
>
> 1. Yes, there are lots of rules and guidelines with varying degrees of
> clarity and authority. This seems to me to be an understandable outcome of
> a bottom-up process for developing many of Wikipedia's rules and
> guidelines. I think that many of those rules and guidelines were created
> with good intentions, and the complex nature of an encyclopedia requires
> considerable thought being invested in the encyclopedia's structure.
>
> 2. However, the maintenance, coordination, organization, and harmonization
> of the guidelines and rules is difficult with the diffuse nature of
> Wikipedia and its community. A Wikipedia community, such as English
> Wikipedia or German Wikipedia, could by consensus delegate some
> responsibility to a committee for one or more of these functions. If a
> community wanted to make such a delegation, there would also need to be
> people who have the time, skills, and willingness to execute the role well.
> A chronic problem with Wikipedia communities is that we have far greater
> need that we can possibly fill with our limited human resources.
>
> 3. If we move up a level of abstraction to consider "user friendliness", of
> which the rules and guidelines are one aspect, we probably can make
> improvements, although again we are limited by human resource constraints
> (and also by financial constraints). I am working on a long term project to
> develop training resources for English Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata. I
> hope that these resources will decrease the steepness of the learning
> curve. I believe that similar work is already happening for Italian
> Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, and that at least one other person is
> working on improving the documentation for Visual Editor on English
> Wikipedia.
>
> 4. I think that in-context help for Wikipedia and its sister projects could
> be very beneficial. However, the Wikimedia Foundation is not Google,
> Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple. WMF does not have dozens or hundreds
> of spare engineers, designers, and researchers who can be easily reassigned
> to work on improving the interface. WMF does have a significant amount of
> money its its reserves, and I believe that a good choice would be to shift
> the WMF's priorities away from increasing the size of the reserve and
> toward improving the interface.
>
> I realize that this is a complex and perhaps disappointing reply to your
> thoughtful email. I think that we can make improvements on user
> friendliness in multiple ways, that some of this work is ongoing, and that
> perhaps WMF can be convinced to spend more resources in this area.
>
> Thanks for speaking up.
>
> Pine
> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 5:42 AM, Zubin JAIN 
> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> > As a rare newcomer to the Wikimedia project, I've been thinking of some
> of
> > the factors that seem to discourage me from contributing and one of the
> > primary ones seem to be the fact that the way the administration is
> > organized and rules enforced is often vague and unclear. The definition
> and
> > the method of collection of the vague idea of "Consensus" aren't easily
> > found and take a lot of digging to get out.
> >
> > A lot of the guideline is often mixed with philosophical rants that often
> > seem to contradict each other and has grown in size to the point that
> it's
> > unreasonable for any newcomer to have read through it all. The project
> > designed to work on consensus and community often seems unresponsive and
> > automated as anarchic communication structure impedes effective
> > communication by forcing users to learn an obscure markup language just
> to
> > communicate.
> >
> > I'm wondering if there have been any whitepapers on addressing these
> > problems especialy the ones about bureaucracy, reading through the news I
> > remember a lot of hay being made about a decline in Wikipedia editor
> from a
> > few years back but that seems ot have faded. Is there any hard data on
> the
> > future trajectory of the project?
> >
> > --
> > Sincerely,
> > Zubin Jain
> > ___
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> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Time to simplify the Bureaucracy ?

[John Erling Blad]

This is slightly more complex. Some projects have a very large and steady
decline, especially in new contributors,[1] while some projects have an
increase, especially in the established users group.[2] Why it is so is not
clear at all, but some editors favor an idea that other sites like Facebook
have drained the pool of available editors. What is pretty clear is that
users have limited time and Wikipedia is not what they favor the most. To
little social and cultural credit for the work, perhaps even a hostile
environment, can be attributed to the decline.

The referenced graphs are made by averaging over a one year window, and
taking a diff over one year to make the trend visible. It looks backward in
time to avoid the artificial drop-off that became so much discussed some
years ago!

[1]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowiki-stats-new-users-2017-01-15.png
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowiki-stats-100-users-2017-01-15.png

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 11:16 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Zubin and welcome.
>
> The discussions about declining editor levels started to go quiet in mid
> 2015 after we noticed that numbers had started to rally at the end of 2014.
>
> Here is the signpost article that covered part of this in 2015
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
> 2015-08-26/In_focus
> That focussed on the very active, but the raw edit count shows the same
> pattern on English wikipedia, a decline from 2007 to 2014, then a rally and
> the last couple of years being broadly stable.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits
>
> "Wikipedia in terminal decline" was an interesting story for journalists
> and others, "maturing organisation is broadly stable on several measures"
> sounds just a tad boring.
>
> As for your concern about bureaucracy and philosophical rants. Many of the
> policies are complex, and there are even examples of things that contradict
> each other. But it is a very very complex system, and some of the
> complexity comes from hard won compromises between people with very
> different views. A commercial organisation could have done some things more
> simply, but a volunteer organisation can't simply tell people to do what
> they are paid to do. I suspect that many reforms are possible and may even
> be necessary, but it really helps when you are changing something to
> understand the different perspectives that lead to that compromise.
>
>
> WereSpielChequers
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > --
> >
> > Message: 5
> > Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 21:42:32 +0800
> > From: Zubin JAIN 
> > To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Time to simplify the Bureaucracy ?
> > Message-ID:
> > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

We do need better tools to curate the existing articles, but that is not a
blocker for new ways to create and edit articles.

For example, what if we could simply select a sentence, create a query on
some search engine, and then have an ai-bot crawl the result to see if one
of the hits can be used as a source? Turned around, the ai-bot could check
the sentences in an article and flag those it can't verify, thus guiding
the editor to back those sentences with references. That would off-load the
bulk of the work on sourcing articles.

Just an idea.

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 6:49 PM, Renée Bagslint 
wrote:

> Does it make sense to have more articles in a language than can be curated
> by the volunteers who speak that language?  This has already happened on
> the Englisg-language Wikipedia where the five million articles have simply
> overwhelmed the capability of the few thousand active contributors to
> self-organise and curate -- for example, there are about one million
> articles without adequate sources, and thousands of unsourced BLP; there
> are copyvio cleanups that will not complete, if ever, before 2030.  An army
> of hand-coded bots is just about keeping on top of vandalism.  How does
> that scale to projects where the number of native speaker contributors is
> in the dozens rather than the thousands?
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 4:17 PM, Vi to  wrote:
>
> > (This thread is getting terribly interesting)
> >
> > I generally think Wikipedia should be a strictly non interfering observer
> > for various aspects, language included. I fear if a wiki tries to set a
> > model for a language it may be a model which doesn't represent the
> reality
> > of that language: small wikis are often monopolized by a few users.
> That's
> > not a fault per se but it may introduce a significant bias in linguistic
> > models used.
> >
> > About one of Amir's emails I think a "small" Wikipedia edition is sign
> of a
> > series of situations, one of the most common of is an endangered
> language.
> > While planning should differentiate between endangered and non endangered
> > language I think most of problems we have to face are related to
> languages
> > endangered at various levels.
> >
> > On a more practical and less ideological note, I should note that even
> > though I didn't run the numbers, I strongly suspect that translating
> 10,000
> > articles to 100 languages is considerably cheaper than teaching 7 billion
> > people English.
> >
> > I don't why but I tend to second your suspects :p
> >
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > 2018-02-27 16:53 GMT+01:00 Peter Southwood  >:
> >
> > > If the people creating the basic encyclopaedic terminology and style in
> > > the language are native speakers, then it would not be a thing imposed
> > from
> > > outside. It would be a development within the language, just like it
> was
> > > with the languages that already have encyclopaedias. The basic
> > > encyclopaedic terminology and style in languages that have then also
> had
> > to
> > > be created before it existed, it just happened earlier. Living
> languages
> > > evolve to deal with the realities of the present. Those which don’t,
> tend
> > > to die out as they become less useful. Cheers, Peter
> > >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > > Behalf Of Vi to
> > > Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 1:43 PM
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > >
> > > I see Amir's points, which are pretty reasonable, but I fear this would
> > > suit languages with a significant presence on the web.
> > >
> > > Among them I agree with points 1, 3 and 4 while I'm not sure about #2
> > > "creating basic encyclopedic terminology and style in that language",
> if
> > we
> > > want to preserve a language we shouldn't create a thing.
> > >
> > > By the way I was wondering my concerns about cultural colonization may
> be
> > > addressed -for wikis which has some contents (let's say at least 1000
> > > articles)- by starting expanding existing articles instead of
> translating
> > > new ones. This would solve the problem of choosing what to translate
> > though
> > > would leave problems about the perspective contents are created.
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > > 2018-02-27 12:31 GMT+01:00 Amir E. Aharoni <
> amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il
> > >:
> > >
> > > > 2018-02-27 13:00 GMT+02:00 mathieu stumpf guntz <
> > > > psychosl...@culture-libre.org>:
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Le 24/02/2018 à 18:08, Vi to a écrit :
> > > > >
> > > > >> *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > > > >> Wikipedians.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> I think this misses an important point that is, we don't need the
> > > > initial
> > > > > translator to turn into a sustaining editor, we need the article to
> > > > evolve
> > > > > with call to action incentives. And 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Using a term from another language while creating an article and then later
localizing that term isn't that difficult, and should not be described as
impossible. What it does although identifies a problem with our current
production system; it is easy to move an article, but it is not easy to
make terms referring to that article or concept consistent.

On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 2:58 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> Yes, I mentioned something like this in one of my emails in this thread.
>
> Every language goes through a period of creating terminology. Some
> languages successfully create native words (Icelandic is a famous example),
> some languages are fine with taking foreign words (um, English took a lot
> from Latin, Greek and other languages), some are a mix (Russian). You can
> never say "it's *impossible* to write about science in this language"; you
> can, at most, say "it's *difficult* to write about science in this language
> *today".
>
> People who speak a language that had already overcome this problem must
> remember that their language didn't always have this terminology. That's
> one of the reasons why the resolution "just learn our language instead of
> investing in your own" may be practical, but isn't very fair.
>
> People who speak a language that hadn't yet overcome this must remember
> that it's a challenge, but not a blocker. A translator who cares about
> their language can overcome this with some ingenuity and resourcefulness.
> (Teaser: I'm about to publish a blog post soon that talks about one
> language that is doing it now with considerable success.)
>
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
> 2018-03-04 15:22 GMT+02:00 Peter Southwood :
>
> > Part of the problem may be that the vocabulary is lacking. It is very
> > difficult to explain a concept in one language when you know the words
> only
> > in another language, and it would be considered original research by some
> > Wikipedias to make up words for the job. I have struggled with
> translations
> > into Afrikaans, which has a reasonably extensive technical vocabulary,
> and
> > good electronic dictionary systems,, but many concepts familiar to me in
> my
> > fields of interest just do not have Afrikaans words (yet).
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of WereSpielChequers
> > Sent: 04 March 2018 11:54
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> >
> > Pine, there is one possible way to fund such translation in the future;
> > The Foundation is building up an endowment. When that endowment has grown
> > to the point where the annual return is sufficient to fund the
> Foundation,
> > then you could re-purpose the annual fundraiser from collecting money to
> > host Wikipedia, to collecting money to make Wikipedia available in other
> > languages.
> >
> > If I'm correct in thinking that part of the problem for many of our
> widely
> > spoken languages with weak wikipedias is that the more educated people
> who
> > speak those languages are more likely to contribute edits in what is to
> > them a  higher status or more language or one more useful to their
> career,
> > then maybe we should test using fundraiser  type advertising to ask our
> > English readers in places like India to translate articles from English
> to
> > Indic languages.
> >
> > In some parts of the world where incomes are generally very low and
> > financial donations reflect that perhaps we have little to lose by
> shifting
> > now from asking for funds to asking for content donations, especially in
> > the language of that area.
> >
> > WereSpielChequers
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:13:38 -0800
> > > From: Pine W 
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > > Message-ID:
> > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

It should also be possible for an editor to let the payment go back to
foundation. This would probably be the case for many users in industrial
countries.

Perhaps it wasn't clear enough but the interface to manage translations
would be for someone other than the involved translators, aka a third
person within the local community, to accept the translation as valid and
good enough. After it is ticked off as "done" further payment of that
specific article will stop.

On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 11:27 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You guys are making the whole idea way to complex. There should be no
> editorial board. That goes against the whole wiki-way of doing things.
> There should be no additional foundation, that makes the whole idea
> unmanageable. It will also cost way more than the gain.
>
> Make thing DarnSimple™! A single list covering all universally valid
> topics that a true encyclopedia should cover. Leave it to the translator to
> chose which source article to use, as this creates the best opportunity to
> find translators. Allow other editors to join in after publication, but do
> respect the primary translators effort. Split the payment in one for the
> initial translation, and one for the followup edits. Cap them to avoid
> bloated articles.
>
> Make a DarnSimple™ interface to manage the translations, where the only
> action is for some identified user to tick of translated articles when they
> reach a certain threshold. In another interface the translator must
> identify himself with sufficient details to make the payment possible. This
> should be an optional part of the usual configuration of an account. All
> persons involved in the editing should have a split, but no payment will be
> done before the account for each editor reaches some threshold.
>
> Make the core list big enough to create a real encyclopedia, but small
> enough that there are room for local additions. There should probably be
> some way to specify local articles, like municipalities, important authors,
> and politicians. A good test is whether such additional articles makes
> sense in neighboring countries or languages. If it isn't possible to
> describe such things in a generic way they should probably be left out. I'm
> not sure if it should be possible to exclude articles, but I guess it will
> be an issue for some languages. Think Armenian genocide, which is
> problematic for some countries.
>
> A small single-book encyclopedia is about 60-70k articles, so lets say
> such a list would cover 25% of this. That would be a list of 15k articles.
> There are perhaps 50 Wikipedias that are large enough to be sustainable,
> and still small enough to miss articles on such a list. That would imply
> 750k articles,  thus plenty of articles for those that would like to
> translate one! Lets say this project is spread over 10 years with a cap on
> each article at 2x USD 10, then it would cost about USD 1500k each year. I
> believe that would be manageable. (Quite frankly I doubt it would be
> possible to find many enough translators, so this will never reach the
> proposed levels!)
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

You guys are making the whole idea way to complex. There should be no
editorial board. That goes against the whole wiki-way of doing things.
There should be no additional foundation, that makes the whole idea
unmanageable. It will also cost way more than the gain.

Make thing DarnSimple™! A single list covering all universally valid topics
that a true encyclopedia should cover. Leave it to the translator to chose
which source article to use, as this creates the best opportunity to find
translators. Allow other editors to join in after publication, but do
respect the primary translators effort. Split the payment in one for the
initial translation, and one for the followup edits. Cap them to avoid
bloated articles.

Make a DarnSimple™ interface to manage the translations, where the only
action is for some identified user to tick of translated articles when they
reach a certain threshold. In another interface the translator must
identify himself with sufficient details to make the payment possible. This
should be an optional part of the usual configuration of an account. All
persons involved in the editing should have a split, but no payment will be
done before the account for each editor reaches some threshold.

Make the core list big enough to create a real encyclopedia, but small
enough that there are room for local additions. There should probably be
some way to specify local articles, like municipalities, important authors,
and politicians. A good test is whether such additional articles makes
sense in neighboring countries or languages. If it isn't possible to
describe such things in a generic way they should probably be left out. I'm
not sure if it should be possible to exclude articles, but I guess it will
be an issue for some languages. Think Armenian genocide, which is
problematic for some countries.

A small single-book encyclopedia is about 60-70k articles, so lets say such
a list would cover 25% of this. That would be a list of 15k articles. There
are perhaps 50 Wikipedias that are large enough to be sustainable, and
still small enough to miss articles on such a list. That would imply 750k
articles,  thus plenty of articles for those that would like to translate
one! Lets say this project is spread over 10 years with a cap on each
article at 2x USD 10, then it would cost about USD 1500k each year. I
believe that would be manageable. (Quite frankly I doubt it would be
possible to find many enough translators, so this will never reach the
proposed levels!)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

There are something similar to paid translations in what you may call
prioritized articles. That is articles that are so important for a language
that they should be written, no matter whether they exist in a larger
language.

For example in the Northern Sami Wikipedia there should be an article about
Sami border guides during WWII. The article at nowiki describes exclusively
border guides between Norway and Sweden, [1] which where a rather low
intensity border during WWII. The frontier between Norway and Russia was
much more hostile, and later in the war also the frontier between Norway
and Finland. The article at enwiki is similar. [2] There are a number of
good sources, and also some quite interesting articles.[3][4][5]

I wonder if such important articles can be prioritized on a list of paid
work by WMF, as they are extremly important to balance facts that otherwise
can go unnoticed by the community. We as a community tend to write about
our interests, and so reflects the interest of the larger society. That
society is not necessarily aware of some of the biases that is inherent in
our common knowledge.

[1] https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenselos
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_guide
[3]
https://forskning.no/andre-verdenskrig/2015/02/risikerte-livet-ble-fratatt-all-aere
[4] https://www.nrk.no/nordland/vil-ha-frem-samenes-krigsinnsats-1.11694527
[5]
https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/samiske-grenseloser-reddet-tusenvis-sa-ble-de-beskyldt-for-landssvik/60993886
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

That is a very good example!

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 11:39 AM, Harald Haugland  wrote:

> This thread brought me to think of an article I wrote on Norwegian
> Wikipedia about a year ago. It was about the Allex Project   (African
> Languages Lexical Project), a project where universities in Oslo,
> Gothenburg and Harare cooperated in developing monolingual text corpus
> based dictionaries for shona and ndebele languages in Zimbabwe.
>
> The project resulted in a dictionary in shona, establishing a lexicographic
> institute at the university of Zimbabwe, African Languages Research
> Institute, 10 doctor degrees for zimbabwians and much more. Shona and
> ndbele were lifted from spoken language to university level and
> acknowledged as education language.
>
> There is a wikipedia in shona language. It has 3106 articles. If one could
> engage some of the people that worked in the Allex Project to do a paid
> translation job, it would benefit about 14 million speakers, shona is the
> most spoken Bantu language, Zulu is next to shona, spoken by 10 million,
> according to our articles.
>
> https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALLEX-prosjektet
>
> Greetings from frozen, sunny Norway
>
> Harald Haugland
>
>
>
>
> 2018-02-28 15:03 GMT+01:00 Jean-Philippe Béland :
>
> > The Wikimedia movement is more than encyclopedias... We already have
> > Wikiversity for teaching, no? Are efforts to contribute to Wikiversity
> and
> > other sister projects making us lose focus? I'm not sure to understand
> what
> > you are saying.
> >
> > JP
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 2:32 AM Amir E. Aharoni <
> > amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> >
> > > 2018-02-28 1:25 GMT+02:00 James Salsman :
> > >
> > > > > I was not trying to say that everybody
> > > > > should learn English. The point I was
> > > > > trying to make there is that knowing
> > > > > English is a privilege and that it is easy
> > > > > to not notice it.
> > > >
> > > > I agree with that, too. How is teaching language different relative
> to
> > > > the Foundation Mission than teaching subjects of encyclopedia
> > > > articles?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles. We are making it possible
> to
> > > write them and to read them. It is not the same thing as teaching
> > subjects.
> > >
> > > Should we do teaching? Maybe, but since it's different from making it
> > > possible to write and read, I'm afraid it would be losing focus.
> > >
> > > Is there anything bad about teaching languages? Of course not. It's
> > great.
> > > I'm just not sure that it's the right thing for Wikimedia to do, when
> > > Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki
> > > articles.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> > > http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> > > ‪“We're living in pieces,
> > > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

WWII is not an universal truth. If some small country claim the Nazis was
the good guys, then they are simply wrong.

Yes there are a lot of projects where information diverge, but usually that
is because someone added material that somehow seems more appropriate for
readers in that specific language. Although sometimes the content is really
wrong, and that happen on all projects.


On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hoi,
> I have been involved in a translation project with professional translators
> translating featured articles of the English Wikipedia. The choice for
> featured articles was done because we expected that the content would not
> be in dispute. We found different. Several of the translated articles were
> not accepted.. one of them was about World War II.
>
> I have also toyed with the idea of content that is not available in the
> language of a Wikipedia (including English). Translation is one solution an
> other solution is generating basic information from the data available at
> Wikidata. The benefit is not only to our readers; they will at least be
> informed up to a point and another benefit will be the quality of the
> Wikipedia involved. One problem that will be fixed is the one of false
> friends, when red links are linked to Wikidata, the information provided
> will always be implicitly correct. Another possibility is to provide the
> text of a sister Wikipedia.
>
> We can do a better job by providing the sum of all knowledge that is
> available to us.
> Thanks,
>   GerardM
>
> On 25 February 2018 at 15:16, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Sorry, but this does not make sense. The core articles apply globally.
> > There will although be articles in additions to a list of core articles,
> > but I don't try to advocate any of those lists as the one and only list.
> > Actually I have toyed with an idea of automatically create a list of core
> > articles, and that would identify important articles no matter if they
> are
> > from a big western language or a minority language.
> >
> > The main problem is NOT that minority languages should have articles
> about
> > the major cities and important philosophers, *the main problem is that
> > minor languages can't get started because they lack content*!
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:41 AM, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Cultural appropriation is something different, by "forcing" the
> contents
> > in
> > > a minority language we would actually be at risk of implementing a form
> > of
> > > "cultural colonialism" which is the opposite of a cultural
> appropriation.
> > >
> > > NOTE: I refer to "the Western" in both cultural and "Wikipedian"
> sense: I
> > > mean cultures with a strong presence on the web plus developed and
> > > flourishing Wikipedia communities.
> > >
> > > Helping minority languages with funds/workforce is not bad in my
> opinion,
> > > but I think a bottom-up process must be followed, with the "bottom"
> being
> > > as closer as possible to relevant linguistic/cultural communities. A
> > > Wikipedia full of "what the Westerns think is important" in a minority
> > > non-Western language would definitely fail project scopes.
> > >
> > > This kind of problem almost does not arise with minority language
> > > associated to Western cultures since they share the same cultural
> > > backgrounds: back to my previous example the cultural background of
> > > Sicilian is substantially equal to Italian one. Still, as I already
> > wrote,
> > > wikis in minority languages should focus on a certain aspect of wiki
> > scope:
> > > Wiki has roughly two main scopes: 1) sharing knowledge in a certain
> > > language 2) also preserving the cultural heritage associated with
> > different
> > > languages. For languages mainly spoken as first language the "sharing
> > > knowledge" aspect is predominant, while the second should take
> precedence
> > > in languages whose speakers are native speakers of a "bigger" language.
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > > 2018-02-24 22:58 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > > Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation.
> > Not
> > > > sure if it is possible to agree on this.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

I wonder if creating dynamic articles from Wikidata is better than creating
static articles. Because we lack tools for this, it is easier to do this
offline, and as a consequence we get the static bot-articles.

Den søn. 25. feb. 2018, 16.26 skrev Gabriel Thullen <gabr...@thullen.com>:

> I should have joined in this discussion a little earlier. I work a lot with
> the French Wikipedia, and we do not just translate articles from English (6
> million articles) to French (only 2 million articles). The French community
> is large and active, and provide a unique local perspective on the
> different articles that are written. And when I say local, I mean that
> things are seen differently in France than in the French speaking part of
> Switzerland or Belgium.
>
> I think that we are ignoring something very important here: putting it
> simply, Wikipedia contributors do two things. They add information to the
> encyclopedia by improving articles or writing new ones, and they curate or
> check the existing articles. All this talk about machine translation does
> not address the second aspect of what the volunteer contributors do.
> This means that we could have hundreds of thousands of articles in a
> language with  very few active contributors. Will that small community be
> able to oversee so many articles ?
>
> For example, have a look at the list of Wikipedias ordered by number of
> articles:
> 1. English - 5,578,081 articles - 138,479 active users - 1,230 admins
> 2. Cebuano - 5,383,108 articles - 162 active users - 5 admins
> 3. Swedish - 3,784,331 articles - 2,929 active users - 65 admins
> 4. German - 2,157,495 articles - 20, 085 active users - 194 admins
>
> When I have some time, I will look into different ratios like number or
> articles/active users or number of articles/number of native language
> speakers... Now I am not saying that our Swedish friends have abused
> machine translation of articles, but I definetly that something is not
> quite right about the Cebuano wiki...
> Gabe
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 4:06 PM, Anders Wennersten <
> m...@anderswennersten.se
> > wrote:
>
> > I am very happy to follow this thread as I believe it is addressing a
> very
> > relevant issue.
> >
> > In my mind we can divide up the different language version into 5
> > categories:
> >
> > 1.Enwp,
> >
> > 2.the next 6-7 (de,fr, es,jp,pt,ru..)
> >
> > 3.the next 20 or so, where the basic workprocesses are applied
> >
> > 4.the next 40-50 which are struggling to generate more input then what is
> > vandalised
> >
> > 5.the rest which in reality is no viable online encyclopedias
> >
> > And for me no 1 priority is to accept that there are these categories,
> and
> > that what is applicable for cat 1 and 2 is not so for 4 and 5.
> >
> > I believe the grant model could easily make room for subsiding good
> > initiatives addressing the problem for cat 4 and 5 (and perhaps 3).
> >
> > And I think it is very presumptuous to start talking of what technique to
> > use and things like translation. If we open up for creative brainstorming
> > (among the ones having the need) I think very many other ways can turn
> up.
> > Myself I am deeply impressed what you can create using Wikidata as a base
> > source of info, and being from a version of type 3 I see how much my
> > homeversion improve content with wikidata created infoboxes
> >
> > Anders
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Den 2018-02-24 kl. 13:51, skrev John Erling Blad:
> >
> >> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >>
> >> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k
> articles,
> >> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >>
> >> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
> are
> >> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> >> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> >> articles from the expanded list[2].
> >>
> >> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
> $1
> >> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> >> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> >> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> >> good translation tools.
> >>
> >> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> >> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
> >> at
&g

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

lopedia" is not a new concept for them. The
> culture around these languages already had well-developed scientific
> terminology and a language style.
>
> When I speak to people who write in Wikipedia in languages of India,
> Philippines, and other developing countries, they complain about different
> things from people that write in European languages. For example, they very
> often complain about the difficulty of writing in an encyclopedic style and
> bridging the colloquial language that common people can read and the
> standardized versions of the respective languages. This makes me think that
> they were standardized in a way that is problematic for *actually* writing
> an encyclopedia that would be useful to the general public.
>
> A *massive* project for writing in a language, would create a critical mass
> of people who would either make the general public accustomed to reading in
> this standard language, or create a new de facto standard. But I guess that
> none of the current Wikipedia projects in these languages have this
> critical mass of writers.
>
> A translation project, such as what Jon Erling Blad and Lane Rasberry are
> suggesting in this thread *may* create such a critical mass. It also needs
> bold leaders, who will take it upon themselves Languages that are developed
> today went through periods of directed development in the past; Lomonosov
> did it for Russian, Diderot did it for French, and so on. This can happen
> today as well. (English went through this, too, although I'm not sure which
> person should be tied to it: Isaac Newton? Samuel Johnson? John Harris
> (Q562265)? Alfred the Great? Probably all of them to some degree.)
>
> I'd even go further and say that I don't agree with Lane when he says that
> the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. It sounds like a given thing
> to some people, but it isn't. Quite the contrary; it's imaginable that a
> careful and thoughtful project of this nature can be carried out by the WMF
> itself. "WMF never does this" is not a rule, and it must not be a mental
> blocker. I increasingly feel that the WMF is gradually, increasingly
> understanding that different languages need different kinds of resources
> and support, and this may include paid content creation. (Before you jump
> to conclusions: I'm a WMF staff member, but please don't understand from
> this that I know about some internal project to do such a thing, or that I
> am suggesting to do this. Neither thing is true. I'm just writing a sincere
> stream of consciousness about my opinions and feelings, and I might be
> wrong about it all.)
>
> That said, it does make more sense to me that organizations other than the
> WMF should lead such work, perhaps with some WMF funding, for the sake of
> thought diversity if for nothing else. But whether it's paid for by the WMF
> directly, by Wikimedia chapters, by thematic interest groups, or by
> somebody else is not the main issue. What is important, is that *local*
> people and native speakers are as involved as possible in the content
> creation, and that the list of topics to be translated is not too strongly
> dictated.
>
> (I also like the suggestion of translating from different languages. For
> practical reasons, English is the most common translation source [1], but
> translating from French, Russian, Chinese, or other languages, is awesome
> for diversity—not just politically, but philosophically as well.)
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CXStats
>
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
> 2018-02-24 14:51 GMT+02:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>:
>
> > This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >
> > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >
> > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
> are
> > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> > "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> > articles from the expanded list[2].
> >
> > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
> $1
> > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> > language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> > countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> > good translation tools.
> >
> > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> > without a base set of articles it won't b

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

I like this!
+1000!!

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 11:07 PM, Info WorldUniversity <
i...@worlduniversityandschool.org> wrote:

> John and All,
>
> As a possible complement to this discussion, CC-4 MIT
> OpenCourseWare-centric World University and School seeks to matriculate
> students in all ~200 countries' official/main languages (
> https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Languages), and may
> compensate them for work in a number of ways, including translation and
> developing machine translation (and in all 7,099 living languages
> eventually).
>
> World Univ. and Sch. donated ourselves to Wikidata in 2015 for
> co-development, and got a new WUaS Miraheze Mediawiki last year in these
> regards too.
>
> Cheers, Scott
> - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Nation_States
> (each to become a major online University for free CC-4 OCW degrees)
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:49 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > It is a long time since everyone on these projects were solely
> volunteers.
> > :)
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen <toddmal...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why
> > aren't
> > > I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
> > > getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I
> not
> > > getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading
> input
> > > and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter
> what I
> > > do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
> > >
> > > If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with
> the
> > > idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if
> you
> > > start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
> > >
> > > Todd
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
> > > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> > > > Cheers,
> > > > Peter
> > > >
> > > > -Original Message-
> > > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On
> > > > Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> > > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > > >
> > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> simple
> > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > >
> > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > > > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > > > > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves.
> > Articles
> > > > > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical,
> ie
> > > > > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those
> > will
> > > > be pretty small.
> > > > >
> > > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > > editor!
> > > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <
> jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > > > > are
> > > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> > project.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made
> efforts
> > > > > > more
> > > > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > > > > >> that
> > > &g

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Not sure what you mean by common search terms, but if it is about direct
translation of search terms to get good SEO ranking it is outside what I'm
talking about. That area will vanish completely in a coupe of years.

I've replied about medical articles previously, and why this isn't an area
where it is easy to translate articles.

I agree to both of your bullet points, but note that for point 1, creating
a core set of articles are necessary to attract interest to the project.
There are some weird ideas that these kind of projects emerge from nothing,
but it is a lot of really hard work to start them. Without a base set of
articles the projects does not attract readers, and without readers no
contributors, and without contributors no articles.

The main problem isn't the "cultural colonialism" or "cultural
appropriation" BS, it is lack of articles and thus non-existing communities.

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 12:10 PM, Jonathan Cardy <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There were two presentations on paid translation at Wikimania in Gdansk. I
> think that would be 2010? One by Google.org, the other by Google.com
> (charity and corporate wings).
>
> I'm afraid my memory of the event is far from perfect. But some things
> stuck in my mind.
>
> As one would expect, many of the things that could go wrong had gone wrong.
>
> Translators were not recruited from the community and did not understand
> the need to interact with the community.
>
> The aims of the two projects were very different. .org wanted to make
> basic medical info available in a number of languages that were emerging on
> the Internet; .com wanted to give responses to common search terms in those
> languages. Bangla, Tamil and I think Telegu were among them.
>
> One, I think it was Bangla had banned a group of translators, on another
> an irate attendee explained that people who spoke his language did not want
> articles on Hollywood film stars: I suspect that shows a disconnect between
> search engine results and the wishes of wikipedians, it illustrates the
> concerns others have already raised re colonialism, and the difficulty of
> mixing volunteers and paid staff in one project.
>
> No surprise that one of the two projects was much more contentious than
> the other, and not just among Wikipedians on the target project. I can
> understand the frustration of a wikipedian volunteer who realises he is
> fixing for free work that someone else has been paid to do.
>
> I don't know whether the concern about Hollywood was just an inter
> generational thing, whether the people with access tohollywood films were
> representative of the young, or representative of the tech savvy verbally
> bilingual early adopters in that society and unrepresentative of the tens
> of millions in that language who were about to come online.
>
> But I do remember the "common search term" project being much more
> contentious than the medical one.
>
> My experience from here and several other part volunteer communities is
> that there are two golden rules to follow when mixing paid and unpaid staff.
>
> 1 Only pay people to do things that the volunteers want to have happen but
> aren't volunteering to do.
> 2 As much as possible recruit your paid staff from your community of
> volunteers.
>
> Sadly almost all my examples of getting this wrong come from this movement.
>
> Regards
>
> Jonathan / WereSpielChequers
>
>
> > On 24 Feb 2018, at 19:41, wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> >
> > Send Wikimedia-l mailing list submissions to
> >   wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> >   https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> >   wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > You can reach the person managing the list at
> >   wikimedia-l-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of Wikimedia-l digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >  1. Re: Paid translation (Gnangarra)
> >  2. Re: Paid translation (Michael Snow)
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 03:05:41 +0800
> > From: Gnangarra 
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > Message-ID:
> >   

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Sorry, but this does not make sense. The core articles apply globally.
There will although be articles in additions to a list of core articles,
but I don't try to advocate any of those lists as the one and only list.
Actually I have toyed with an idea of automatically create a list of core
articles, and that would identify important articles no matter if they are
from a big western language or a minority language.

The main problem is NOT that minority languages should have articles about
the major cities and important philosophers, *the main problem is that
minor languages can't get started because they lack content*!

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:41 AM, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Cultural appropriation is something different, by "forcing" the contents in
> a minority language we would actually be at risk of implementing a form of
> "cultural colonialism" which is the opposite of a cultural appropriation.
>
> NOTE: I refer to "the Western" in both cultural and "Wikipedian" sense: I
> mean cultures with a strong presence on the web plus developed and
> flourishing Wikipedia communities.
>
> Helping minority languages with funds/workforce is not bad in my opinion,
> but I think a bottom-up process must be followed, with the "bottom" being
> as closer as possible to relevant linguistic/cultural communities. A
> Wikipedia full of "what the Westerns think is important" in a minority
> non-Western language would definitely fail project scopes.
>
> This kind of problem almost does not arise with minority language
> associated to Western cultures since they share the same cultural
> backgrounds: back to my previous example the cultural background of
> Sicilian is substantially equal to Italian one. Still, as I already wrote,
> wikis in minority languages should focus on a certain aspect of wiki scope:
> Wiki has roughly two main scopes: 1) sharing knowledge in a certain
> language 2) also preserving the cultural heritage associated with different
> languages. For languages mainly spoken as first language the "sharing
> knowledge" aspect is predominant, while the second should take precedence
> in languages whose speakers are native speakers of a "bigger" language.
>
> Vito
>
> 2018-02-24 22:58 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>:
>
> > Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation. Not
> > sure if it is possible to agree on this.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
> > >
> > > I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed
> in a
> > > better way by others:
> > > *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> > > translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> > > requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations
> themselves;
> > > *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural
> > identity
> > > of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> > > different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only
> focuses
> > > about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> > > *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> > > identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> > > *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > > Wikipedians.
> > >
> > > IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise
> > texts
> > > of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> > > (wiktionary).
> > >
> > > Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should
> be
> > > dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> > > specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any
> of
> > > its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> > > Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about
> > him
> > > in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake
> > "literary"
> > > language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting"
> > in
> > > Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
> > >
> > > As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> > > knowledge.
> > >

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation. Not
sure if it is possible to agree on this.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
>
> I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> better way by others:
> *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural identity
> of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> Wikipedians.
>
> IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise texts
> of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> (wiktionary).
>
> Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about him
> in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake "literary"
> language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting" in
> Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
>
> As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> knowledge.
>
> Vito
>
> 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>:
>
> > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> >
> > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
> > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> remaining
> > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
> > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > a retired
> > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a
> > new
> > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > involvement
> > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> involved /
> > > have translations from TWB.
> > >
> > > James
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from
> small
> > > > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> > > interesting
> > > > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > > > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the
> concerned
> > > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> > simple
> > > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > > >
> > > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com
> >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Should have added that the remaining poin

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

This is not the same, and is more like the present grant system.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:05 PM, Gnangarra <gnanga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> this would be a good practical exercise to develop for WiR / WikiEd
> programs in universities where they can engage with International Students
> and local students studying additional languages as means of learning the
> written nuances of the individual languages.  Any funding would be better
> utilised in enabling such programs where the flow on impact is more
> likely{fact} to be lasting.  Though I can see value in using a gift/reward
> system for technically disadvantaged communities like the case presented
> about Swahili .The focus would need to be on basic health, hygiene,
> biology, science topics rather than more social or political topics.
>
> On 25 February 2018 at 01:08, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
> >
> > I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> > better way by others:
> > *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> > translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> > requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> > *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural
> identity
> > of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> > different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> > about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> > *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> > identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> > *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > Wikipedians.
> >
> > IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise
> texts
> > of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> > (wiktionary).
> >
> > Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> > dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> > specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> > its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> > Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about
> him
> > in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake
> "literary"
> > language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting"
> in
> > Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
> >
> > As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> > knowledge.
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>:
> >
> > > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> > >
> > > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a
> specialized
> > > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> > remaining
> > > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and
> there
> > > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > > a retired
> > > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator
> into a
> > > new
> > > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > > involvement
> > > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> > involved /
> > > > have translations from TWB.
> > > >
> > > > James
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > You can turn i

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

 works translated and integrated into different
>> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
>> teaching high school students.
>>
>> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
>> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
>> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
>> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
>> these topics this is the first and only information online about it.
>> Google
>> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
>> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
>> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
>> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
>> make it more social.
>>
>> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
>> James
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>>>
>>> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
>>> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>>>
>>> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
>>> are
>>> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
>>> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
>>> thousand
>>> articles from the expanded list[2].
>>>
>>> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
>>> $1
>>> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
>>> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
>>> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
>>> good translation tools.
>>>
>>> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
>>> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
>>> at
>>> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
>>> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
>>> Perhaps
>>> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
>>> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
>>> have to be full translations of the source article.
>>>
>>> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
>>> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
>>> lot
>>> of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
>>>
>>> [1]
>>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
>>> Wikipedia_should_have
>>> [2]
>>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
>>> Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Well, what I wrote about was translating the articles on the lists at meta.
In addition the translators themselves chose which one they want to
translate.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
>
> I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will
> be pretty small.
> >
> > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> editor!
> > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >
> > >
> > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > >
> > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > >> that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > >> articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >
> > >
> > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > >
> > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > >> topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > >
> > >
> > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > >
> > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > require
> > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > >> so
> > languages
> > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests
> > >> to be accepted.
> > >
> > >
> > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project
> > >> which started back in 2011:
> > >>
> > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > >> are extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >>
> > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> > >> Thus we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the
> > >> leads of the English articles.
> > >>
> > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

It is a long time since everyone on these projects were solely volunteers.
:)

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen <toddmal...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why aren't
> I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
> getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I not
> getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading input
> and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter what I
> do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
>
> If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with the
> idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if you
> start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
>
> Todd
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> >
> > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> >
> > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> > > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will
> > be pretty small.
> > >
> > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > editor!
> > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > > are
> > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > > >
> > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > > more
> > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > > >> that
> > > tool
> > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > > >> articles
> > > that
> > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > >
> > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > > >> topics in question.
> > > The
> > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > >
> > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > > require
> > > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > > >> so
> > > languages
> > > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > > >> second review and the volunt

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
statement about my present experience about translators in general.

The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the remaining
group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
a retired
orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a new
> editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have involvement
> of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be involved /
> have translations from TWB.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
> > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> interesting
> > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > wrote:
> >
> > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > >
> > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > interesting
> > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should
> > also
> > > be
> > > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> > articles,
> > > > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
> > > >
> > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > editor!
> > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> are
> > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> project.
> > > > >
> > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > more
> > > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> that
> > > > tool
> > > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > articles
> > > > that
> > > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
> love
> > > the
> > > > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > > >
> > > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > in
> > > > >> which
> > > > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> > > there
> > > > >> is
> > > > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in
> > question.
> > > > The
> > > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
> And
> > > for
> > > > >> languages in which we have little content there are often fe

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more interesting
than strictly translating from the larger language projects.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> wrote:

> I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less interesting
> > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also
> be
> > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
> > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
> >
> > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> editor!
> > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >
> > >
> > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > >
> > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> the
> > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >
> > >
> > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > >
> > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> > >> which
> > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> there
> > >> is
> > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> for
> > >> languages in which we have little content there are often few
> avaliable
> > >> volunteers.
> > >
> > >
> > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > >
> > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> work
> > >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> > languages
> > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> > >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> > >> accepted.
> > >
> > >
> > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> > >> started back in 2011:
> > >>
> > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >>
> > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> Thus
> > >> we
> > >> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of
> the
> > >> English articles.
> > >>
> > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> the
> > >

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less interesting
in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also be
pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.

In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new editor!
You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>
>
> Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
>
> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>
>
> Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
>
> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> which
>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
>> is
>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> volunteers.
>
>
> I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> competing articles are pretty low.
>
> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> accepted.
>
>
> I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>> started back in 2011:
>>
>> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>>
>> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
>> we
>> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>> English articles.
>>
>> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>>
>> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> which
>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
>> is
>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> volunteers.
>>
>> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> accepted.
>>
>> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>> years.
>> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
>> use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
>> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
>> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
>> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

work in this language. Our partnerships
> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
> make it more social.
>
> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >
> > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >
> > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
> are
> > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> > "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> > articles from the expanded list[2].
> >
> > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
> $1
> > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> > language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> > countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> > good translation tools.
> >
> > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> > without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
> at
> > all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> > articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
> Perhaps
> > we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> > Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> > have to be full translations of the source article.
> >
> > A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> > should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
> lot
> > of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
> >
> > [1]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have
> > [2]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>
>
>
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Articles about LGBT topics would be great! Similarly topics about important
women in the third world. I would also like a focus on articles about
primary health. Perhaps also agriculture.

I'm not sure if it is wise to move this out into chapters, keep it simple,
but perhaps community groups should be able to make direct feedback.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:04 PM, Lane Rasberry <l...@bluerasberry.com>
wrote:

> Excellent idea.
>
> I have the idea that the WMF invests $10,000 in the developing world to
> recruit $1000 of volunteer labor.
>
> We need to be realistic about the relative costs of doing Western-style,
> rich country outreach in all economies. In the past, the strategy has been
> to fund the recruitment of volunteers and avoid hiring content producing
> staff no matter the outcomes, cost, or impact.
>
> In the spectrum of the average income of individuals in some places, it is
> obviously easier and more impactful to hire someone with a masters degree
> to outright produce content than to pay for a program which will recruit
> volunteers.
>
> Obviously, the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. However, I think
> that we need to make it easier for Wikimedia chapters, community groups,
> and partner organizations to hire paid contributors. Translation is the
> most obvious place to start because having base content in an encyclopedia
> is the foundation for demonstrating the legitimacy and value of Wikimedia
> projects. Funding should go from WMF to chapters to paid staff for content.
>
> To make this project a go we would need to have a conversation about what
> sort of content is a priority for translation. I have a draft of an idea
> for prioritizing content for translation.
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki99>
> The idea is that for any given field of study, subject matter experts
> identify 99 articles in that field which they deem and come to consensus as
> priorities for having a global conversation in that field. So for example,
> if a group funds translation of LGBT+ content, then we would need to
> develop a canon of LGBT topics to which everyone in the world would have
> access. I have no idea how to choose topics, but fewer than 100 is probably
> not enough and more than 100 is probably too much for an all-languages
> translation project. I could use some help drafting guidelines for how to
> make priorities for what to translate given limited resources.
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:51 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >
> > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >
> > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
> are
> > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> > "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> > articles from the expanded list[2].
> >
> > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
> $1
> > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> > language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> > countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> > good translation tools.
> >
> > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> > without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
> at
> > all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> > articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
> Perhaps
> > we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> > Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> > have to be full translations of the source article.
> >
> > A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> > should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
> lot
> > of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
> >
> > [1]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have
> > [2]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/m

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

I should probably say that I don't believe our present "lists of articles
every Wikipedia should have" are really good. I believe the lists should
reflect what people from different places actually reads, or try to read,
but normalized to a global perspective. That is also a necessity if the
purpose is to create local communities in the different languages. Think
globally, act locally!

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:51 PM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>
> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>
> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
> articles from the expanded list[2].
>
> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> good translation tools.
>
> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> have to be full translations of the source article.
>
> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
> of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
>
> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_
> every_Wikipedia_should_have
> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_
> every_Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
>
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[Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

This discussion is going to be fun! =D

A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.

What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].

Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.

I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.

A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimania 2019

[John Erling Blad]

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bybrunnen#Wikimania_2019

On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 9:37 PM, Sami Mlouhi  wrote:

>  Congratulations Wikimedia Sweden !
>
>
> 2018-02-08 20:07 GMT+01:00 Tanweer Morshed :
>
> > Congratulations Wikimedia Sverige! WMSE is one of the very active and
> > robust chapters, and I believe they will present a very successful
> > Wikimania in 2019.
> >
> > On Thursday, February 8, 2018, Itzik - Wikimedia Israel <
> > it...@wikimedia.org.il> wrote:
> >
> > >  Congratulations Wikimedia Sweden!
> > >
> > > WMSE is one of the strongest and most creative chapters and I'm sure
> > > Wikimania 2019 will be an amazing event!
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > *Itzik Edri*
> > > Chairperson
> > > it...@wikimedia.org.il
> > > +972-54-5878078
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 3:58 AM, Ellie Young 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > *All,On behalf of the Wikimania Steering Committee and the Wikimedia
> > > > Foundation, I am pleased to announce that we have decided to have
> > > Wikimania
> > > > located in Sweden in 2019. The proposal
> > > >  from
> the
> > > > Wikimedia Sweden chapter was accepted. The committee appreciates and
> > > values
> > > > the long standing interest of Wikimania Sweden to host an event, and
> we
> > > > believe that hosting Wikimania will be an opportunity to boost
> > Wikimedia
> > > > projects there with a specific focus on public art, a field in which
> > the
> > > > Swedish Sverige team has been particularly active.  The exact
> location
> > of
> > > > the conference will be confirmed at a later date.The Wikimania
> > Committee
> > > > reviewed and discussed four very strong proposals
> > > >  to host Wikimania
> in
> > > 2019.
> > > > We would also like to thank the proposers from Sweden, Armenia,
> Perth,
> > > and
> > > > Prague for all their efforts in putting together materials for our
> > > > consideration and their time spent discussing the possibilities. It
> is
> > > very
> > > > encouraging to have so much interest from our community from
> > individuals
> > > > who wish to lead and contribute to Wikimania.Please join us in
> > > > congratulating the Wikimedia Wikimedia Sverige!
> > > > Sincerely,Ellie YoungWMF
> > Events
> > > > ManagerOn behalf of the Wikimania Steering Committee and Wikimedia
> > > > Foundation*
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ​
> > > >
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimania-l mailing list
> > > > wikimani...@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
> > > >
> > > >
> > > ___
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> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > 
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Regards,
> > Tanweer
> > ___
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> > 
>
>
>
>
> --
> Sami Mlouhi
> Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS)
> User:Sami Mlouhi  
> Creative Commons coordinator, Wikimedia TN User Group
> Member, Affiliations Committee (Affcom)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

Fine! If people refuse the easy way out, then create an Rfc, and start the
process to make creation of new user accounts non-public information.

Den fre. 26. jan. 2018, 03.04 skrev Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l <
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>:

> you are not "exposing the user unknowingly visiting the site" with the bot
> itself...when you visit the site you are integrated in the SUL, it's public
> information since ages. The fact that a bot takes care of it or a human
> being leaves a message does not tell you a lot more. Sometimes on certain
> wiki welcome messages are delivered sometimes they are not. Sometimes
> immediately, sometimes later. It's a very fragmented situation so the bot
> tells you basically nothing per se, it simple makes some people aware that
> the information of visiting a site exists and it is public.
> So the question is not about the bot, the question is if when you do
> thishttps://
> commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACentralAuth=Alexmar983
> and you can read that it's public that for example I was attached on
> fawiki on 21:41, 11 April 2012, which is basically when I visited it the
> first time. Although not strictly, I could have visited it and the system
> having problem and log me out (that also happen) so technically this is not
> even true sometimes... But even if it was precise, is the public knowledge
> of this information really a threat to my privacy? or it is justing many of
> the things I implicitly agree when I make an account?
> The "violation of privacy" of such information, it's not even comparable
> with dozen of other things in your life. But seriously if THIS is a problem
> and had to be "put secret" than I'd expect to be informed when a check user
> look at my data. You know a few group of people decide when it's right
> or wrong to look at my personal data and not informing me when they do it
> probably because they found nothing (but they have such information in
> their hand now, don't they? Shouldn't I generic user be informed about
> it?), that's not very nice for the privacy of anyone. So the core point is
> not that I receive a message once a year that makes me aware that the SUL
> information exist, but that I don't receive a lot of other messages that I
> should receiving about who's looking at many others of my personal data.
> Privacy is a serious matter. I expect RfC for things that have impact. Now
> imagine that I go to people that are worried and tell them the nobody
> really cares that they are not informed when someone look inside their
> provider data (because put in the end of a small group of people is
> "enough") or that the disaggregated information of CU activity is not
> public for the majority of platforms... but someone cares so much if they
> receive a welcoming message by bot when they visit a platform for the first
> time. I am quite sure that the users I know will not be impressed.
>
> Il Venerdì 26 Gennaio 2018 0:27, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> ha scritto:
>
>
>  I can't see that T42006 is relevant in this case. It is about abusive use
> of a bot, not about creation of the central account in itself.
>
> The existence of a central account leads to creation of the local account.
> This is probably acceptable. Then this may lead to the abusiv behavior, ie
> exposing the user unknowingly visiting the site. This is probably not
> intended and not acceptable.
>
> I wonder if the solution is to filter down the new users to real
> contributors, that would be pretty simple
>
> Den tor. 25. jan. 2018, 22.55 skrev Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com>:
>
> > Joe,
> >
> > I believe that the issue of a potential privacy violation was first
> raised
> > on this list on December 30th, and I first emailed WMF Legal about this
> > issue on January 1st. Keeping in mind that the issue involves potential
> > privacy violations, I think that it's reasonable to think that this issue
> > should have been reviewed within days, not weeks. I disagree with the
> > statement that "A subsequent review is clearly going to be a low priority
> > task as I am sure you can understand Pine." If anything, I think that the
> > situation is clear to the contrary and it should have been reviewed
> within
> > days.
> >
> > For me, an RfC about this matter would be for the purposes of (1)
> > encouraging WMF to give more attention to this matter, (2) attempting to
> > establish community consensus about whether the matters being raised here
> > involve privacy violations, and (3) what should be done, if anything.
> > Personally, I think that the status quo does involve privacy vio

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

I can't see that T42006 is relevant in this case. It is about abusive use
of a bot, not about creation of the central account in itself.

The existence of a central account leads to creation of the local account.
This is probably acceptable. Then this may lead to the abusiv behavior, ie
exposing the user unknowingly visiting the site. This is probably not
intended and not acceptable.

I wonder if the solution is to filter down the new users to real
contributors, that would be pretty simple

Den tor. 25. jan. 2018, 22.55 skrev Pine W :

> Joe,
>
> I believe that the issue of a potential privacy violation was first raised
> on this list on December 30th, and I first emailed WMF Legal about this
> issue on January 1st. Keeping in mind that the issue involves potential
> privacy violations, I think that it's reasonable to think that this issue
> should have been reviewed within days, not weeks. I disagree with the
> statement that "A subsequent review is clearly going to be a low priority
> task as I am sure you can understand Pine." If anything, I think that the
> situation is clear to the contrary and it should have been reviewed within
> days.
>
> For me, an RfC about this matter would be for the purposes of (1)
> encouraging WMF to give more attention to this matter, (2) attempting to
> establish community consensus about whether the matters being raised here
> involve privacy violations, and (3) what should be done, if anything.
> Personally, I think that the status quo does involve privacy violations and
> that there should be changes. Whether that view is shared by others is
> something that the RfC would attempt to measure.
>
> In this circumstance I consider RfC to be similar to a ballot measure, and
> I think that it's appropriate for me to say that if I think that there are
> problems then I may use tools that are available to me to attempt to
> address them, preferably with WMF's cooperation, but without WMF"s
> cooperation if necessary and if possible.
>
> John,
>
> A previous discussion about the privacy issues occurred in
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T42006. I received a new email from WMF
> Legal in which they affirmed their department's 2012 view on this matter.
> The most recent email gave me the impression that they are receptive to
> discussion about whether there should be changes although there may be
> resource limitations. That sounds like a good starting place for a
> conversation, and I think that on the community's side an RfC is the best
> way to gauge the community's views. I am busy for the next few days but
> I'll try to set up an RfC on Meta during the weekend.
>
> Pine 
> 
>
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 2:29 AM, Joseph Seddon 
> wrote:
>
> > This conversation started in the middle of the Christmas break following
> > which I suspect many staff took extended holidays, most departments are
> in
> > the middle annual planning and this week WMF are gathering for their
> annual
> > all hands meetings. So lets firtst consider the fact that senior legal
> > staff have a lot on their plate.
> >
> > This problem has been discussed before and reviewed by legal as
> acceptable.
> > A subsequent review is clearly going to be a low priority task as I am
> sure
> > you can understand Pine.
> >
> > Making threats to handle ones demand and only in a manner that is
> > acceptable to you is hardly going to make staff receptive to expediting
> > your request. Lets give the good people time, afford them patience on our
> > behalf and let them do their jobs.
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 2:04 AM, Pine W  wrote:
> >
> > > FYI for those on WIkimedia-l who may be interested, conversation about
> > this
> > > matter is ongoing. I am waiting a response from WMF Legal, and there
> may
> > be
> > > others who have opened their own lines of inquiry.
> > >
> > > If I don't receive a reply from WMF Legal that I feel is satisfactory,
> or
> > > if I don't receive one at all, then I plan to set up an RfC about this
> > > matter.
> > >
> > > Pine 
> > > 
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Vi to  wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'm scared of the solutions that will "fix" this.
> > > > I expect something as dramatically useful as the removal of "unblock
> > this
> > > > IP" button for IPs caught by autoblocks of registered users.
> > > >
> > > > Vito
> > > >
> > > > 2018-01-01 22:46 GMT+01:00 Pine W :
> > > >
> > > > > I have created https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183876 and am
> > > pinging
> > > > > Legal to request a review of this matter.
> > > > >
> > > > > Happy new year,
> > > > >
> > > > > Pine
> > > > > ___
> > > > > Wikimedia-l 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

If it has been discussed before, then it would be nice if someone can
provide a pointer to that discussion.

Den ons. 24. jan. 2018, 11.29 skrev Joseph Seddon :

> This conversation started in the middle of the Christmas break following
> which I suspect many staff took extended holidays, most departments are in
> the middle annual planning and this week WMF are gathering for their annual
> all hands meetings. So lets firtst consider the fact that senior legal
> staff have a lot on their plate.
>
> This problem has been discussed before and reviewed by legal as acceptable.
> A subsequent review is clearly going to be a low priority task as I am sure
> you can understand Pine.
>
> Making threats to handle ones demand and only in a manner that is
> acceptable to you is hardly going to make staff receptive to expediting
> your request. Lets give the good people time, afford them patience on our
> behalf and let them do their jobs.
>
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 2:04 AM, Pine W  wrote:
>
> > FYI for those on WIkimedia-l who may be interested, conversation about
> this
> > matter is ongoing. I am waiting a response from WMF Legal, and there may
> be
> > others who have opened their own lines of inquiry.
> >
> > If I don't receive a reply from WMF Legal that I feel is satisfactory, or
> > if I don't receive one at all, then I plan to set up an RfC about this
> > matter.
> >
> > Pine 
> > 
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Vi to  wrote:
> >
> > > I'm scared of the solutions that will "fix" this.
> > > I expect something as dramatically useful as the removal of "unblock
> this
> > > IP" button for IPs caught by autoblocks of registered users.
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > > 2018-01-01 22:46 GMT+01:00 Pine W :
> > >
> > > > I have created https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183876 and am
> > pinging
> > > > Legal to request a review of this matter.
> > > >
> > > > Happy new year,
> > > >
> > > > Pine
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > > > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > > > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Unsubscribe:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > > 
> > > >
> > > ___
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> > > 
> > >
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> > 
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Seddon
>
> *Community and Audience Engagement Associate*
> *Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Siamese networks and image classification

[John Erling Blad]

I had a plan to do a more thorough description on meta, but my plans are
always to optimistic… ;)

Question 1: I wonder if anyone has done any work on categorization of
images on Commons by using neural nets.
Question 2: I wonder if anyone has used Siamese networks to do more general
categorization of images.

A Siamese network is a kind of network used for face recognition. It is
called Siamese network because it is two parallel networks in its simplest
form, but one of the networks are precomputed so in effect you only
evaluates one of the networks. Usually you have one face provided by a
camera and run through one network, and a number of other precomputed faces
for the other network. When the difference is small, then you have a face
match.

In general you can have any kind of image as long as you can train a kind
of fingerprint type of vector. This fingerprint will then acts like
locality-sensitive hashing [1]. Because you can create this LSH from the
vector, you can store alternate models in database, so you can later search
it and find usable models. Those models can then interpret the vector form
of the fingerprint, and by evaluating those models with actual input (ie
the fingerprint vector) you can get an estimate for how probable it is that
the image belong to a specific category.

What you would get from the previous process is a list of probable
categorizations. That list can be sorted, and a user trying to categorize
an image can then chose to select some of the categories.

Note that the output of the network is not just a few categories, it can be
a variant number of models that outputs a probability for a specific
category. It is a bit like a map-reduce, where the you find (filter) the
possible models and then evaluate (map) those models with the fingerprint
vector.

It is perhaps not obvious, but the idea behind Siamese networks are two
parallel networks, but the implementation is with a single active network.
Also the implemented network has a first part that computes the fingerprint
vector (kind of a bottleneck network) and the second part are the stored
models that takes this fingerprint vector and calculates a single output
for the probability of a single category.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing

On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 6:47 AM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> I am having a little trouble with understanding your email from January
> 15th. Could you perhaps state your question or point in a different way?
>
> Pine <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro/Bright_Places>
>
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 5:55 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This is the same as the entry on the wishlist for 2016, but describes the
> > actual method.
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_
> > Survey/Categories/Commons#Use_computer_vision_to_propose_categories
> >
> > Both contrastive and triplet loss can be used while learning, but neither
> > are described at Wikipedia.
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 8:16 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi John,
> > >
> > > I have not heard of an initiative to use Siamese neural networks for
> > image
> > > classifications on on Commons. You might make a suggestion on the AI,
> > > Research, and/or Commons mailing lists regarding this idea. You might
> > also
> > > make a suggestion in IdeaLab
> > > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab>.
> > >
> > > Pine <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine>
> > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro/Bright_Places>
> > >
> > > On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 3:46 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Has anyone tried to use a Siamese neural network for image
> > classification
> > > > at Commons? I don't know if it will be good enough to run in
> autonomous
> > > > mode, but it will probably be a huge help for those that do manual
> > > > classification.
> > > >
> > > > Imagine a network providing a list of possible categories, and the
> user
> > > > just ticks off usable categories.
> > > >
> > > > A Siamese network can be learned by using a triplet loss function,
> > where
> > > > the anchor and the positive candidate comes from the same category,
> and
> > > the
> > > > negative candidate comes from an other category but are otherwise
> close
> > > to
> > > > the anchor.
> > > >
> > > > Output from the network is like a fingerprint, an

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Siamese networks and image classification

[John Erling Blad]

This is the same as the entry on the wishlist for 2016, but describes the
actual method.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Categories/Commons#Use_computer_vision_to_propose_categories

Both contrastive and triplet loss can be used while learning, but neither
are described at Wikipedia.

On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 8:16 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> I have not heard of an initiative to use Siamese neural networks for image
> classifications on on Commons. You might make a suggestion on the AI,
> Research, and/or Commons mailing lists regarding this idea. You might also
> make a suggestion in IdeaLab
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab>.
>
> Pine <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro/Bright_Places>
>
> On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 3:46 AM, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Has anyone tried to use a Siamese neural network for image classification
> > at Commons? I don't know if it will be good enough to run in autonomous
> > mode, but it will probably be a huge help for those that do manual
> > classification.
> >
> > Imagine a network providing a list of possible categories, and the user
> > just ticks off usable categories.
> >
> > A Siamese network can be learned by using a triplet loss function, where
> > the anchor and the positive candidate comes from the same category, and
> the
> > negative candidate comes from an other category but are otherwise close
> to
> > the anchor.
> >
> > Output from the network is like a fingerprint, and those fingerprints can
> > be compared to other images with known fingerprints, or against a
> > generalized fingerprint for a category.
> >
> > John Erling Blad
> > ___
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[Wikimedia-l] Siamese networks and image classification

[John Erling Blad]

Has anyone tried to use a Siamese neural network for image classification
at Commons? I don't know if it will be good enough to run in autonomous
mode, but it will probably be a huge help for those that do manual
classification.

Imagine a network providing a list of possible categories, and the user
just ticks off usable categories.

A Siamese network can be learned by using a triplet loss function, where
the anchor and the positive candidate comes from the same category, and the
negative candidate comes from an other category but are otherwise close to
the anchor.

Output from the network is like a fingerprint, and those fingerprints can
be compared to other images with known fingerprints, or against a
generalized fingerprint for a category.

John Erling Blad
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

Norwegians in general does not use welcoming phrases unless you are family,
close friend, or want something from a person. Or as friend said it; you
welcome your sister and mother to the family party, the guy that shall buy
your old rusty car, and your girlfriend when she comes over and you want to
have sex with her.

Jevlad

 lør. 30. des. 2017, 13.00 skrev Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>:

> Oh, I absolutely agree that there is an important cultural aspect here.
> That's why towards the end of the email I acknowledged that this has been
> done for many years.
>
> Nevertheless, it's worth occasionally stopping and thinking about the
> usefulness. These messages are supposed to be sent to new users, but the
> culture we're talking about is the culture of new users; and at the same
> time, we're often saying that many new users have a hard time getting into
> Wikipedia. So the welcome templates may—or may not—be part of this problem.
> This is just one example of a question worth asking.
>
> בתאריך 30 בדצמ׳ 2017 11:38,‏ "Ting Chen" <wing.phil...@gmx.de> כתב:
>
> > Hello Amir,
> >
> >
> > I think what you are questioning is right. And it is necessary to ask
> such
> > questions. In my day job it is my duty to ask and discuss such questions
> > with my customers.
> >
> >
> > But, with the time I sort of see that these pure utilitarian questions
> are
> > not the only questions that we need to consider. I start to ask questions
> > that are beyond or below (according to the perspective) these pure
> > utilitarian questions. I find the answer Meno25 gave on Meta a very
> > interesting one in this respect. In his answer he was not arguing about
> if
> > the welcome-bot is useful or meaningful. He said it is their custom to do
> > so. What he is pointing to is culture. See, why do we hug, shake hands,
> > nod, or rub noses, or kiss? From a pure utilitarian point of view these
> > behaviors are not only meaningless, they are even potentially dangerous
> for
> > our health. If we just want to meet other people and talk to them why do
> we
> > not just directly talk about what we want to talk about and make it
> behind
> > us?
> >
> >
> > And this is why in my opinion it is good that every project has its own
> > way to handle welcome message: Because the welcome message is not only a
> > utilitarian thing, there is culture beyond or below it. There is culture
> > encompassed from the societies where the project community is embedded in
> > and there is culture that was created and developed by the project
> > community.
> >
> >
> > This is why in my opinion as long as the message is not malicious how
> > every community handles this is their own thing.
> >
> >
> > Greetings
> >
> > Ting
> >
> >
> >
> > Am 30.12.2017 um 09:29 schrieb Amir E. Aharoni:
> >
> >> It's a good opportunity to step back and discuss a little something.
> >>
> >> The existence of pretty much every bot is a reason to think of a missing
> >> feature in the site's software. The same goes for templates and gadgets.
> >>
> >> Why do many wikis have custom welcome templates and bots that send them?
> >> The intuitive answer is "to send a personal message to a new user", but
> if
> >> it's done by a bot, it's already not personal. What does the bot
> actually
> >> automate? The placement of a template? But what is the actual purpose of
> >> the template?
> >>
> >> Is it to say "hello and welcome"? The notifications feature already does
> >> it
> >> nicely.
> >>
> >> To send people a list of useful links? I heard many times that new users
> >> actually do find them useful, and it's a good thing. But it's
> nevertheless
> >> an anecdotal claim, and smarter questions should be asked:
> >> * How many people actually read these messages?
> >> * Are all the links useful? Do people actually click them?
> >> * Could some be removed? Could some be added?
> >> * Why is it different in every project? Could at least some parts be
> >> reused
> >> across languages in a robust and properly localizable manner?
> >> * Is the talk page really a good place to do this?
> >> * How useful is it for people for people who come from another language
> >> and
> >> have an account auto-created?
> >>
> >> And so on.
> >>
> >> Welcome templates have been a part of our sites for well over a decade,
> >> but
&g

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

As I recall, communication with newcomers by templates was found to be a
negative factor.

Jeblad

Den lør. 30. des. 2017, 16.58 skrev Jonathan Cardy <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com>:

> Hi Amir,
>
> It isn't too late to ask about the utility of welcome messages, but be
> aware that there are reasons for their evolution over the last decade. Your
> email almost implied that this has been an unreviewed area  for the last
> decade.
>
> There was some research a few years ago that concluded that welcomed
> editors were more likely to stay, despite many welcomes being of the
> "welcome your article has been tagged for deletion" variety. If someone
> fancies digging further it would be good to compare welcomed  and
> unwelcomed editors among the 75% of newbies who edit existing articles and
> also among the 25% or whatever is left of that who come here to create new
> articles.
>
> I think that now would be a good time to develop tailored welcomes for
> mobile and V/E newbies. I'm conscious that the Welcome I usually use
> assumes that newbies who do good edits are using the classic editor and
> contributing with something bigger than a tablet. So sometimes I leave
> newbies unwelcomed rather than give them a potentially confusing welcome.
>
> As for getting a welcome message from a wiki where I have visited but not
> edited, I consider that a privacy violation. We normally claim not to log
> anything about our readers, but if a logged in Wikimedian visits arwiki a
> log is created artificially by issuing them a welcome. It isn't a Privacy
> violation that especially irks me personally, but if we allow it we should
> change the global privacy statements accordingly.
>
> Regards
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> > On 30 Dec 2017, at 13:38, wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2017 10:29:34 +0200
> > From: "Amir E. Aharoni" 
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki
> > Message-ID:
> >
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > It's a good opportunity to step back and discuss a little something.
> >
> > The existence of pretty much every bot is a reason to think of a missing
> > feature in the site's software. The same goes for templates and gadgets.
> >
> > Why do many wikis have custom welcome templates and bots that send them?
> > The intuitive answer is "to send a personal message to a new user", but
> if
> > it's done by a bot, it's already not personal. What does the bot actually
> > automate? The placement of a template? But what is the actual purpose of
> > the template?
> >
> > Is it to say "hello and welcome"? The notifications feature already does
> it
> > nicely.
> >
> > To send people a list of useful links? I heard many times that new users
> > actually do find them useful, and it's a good thing. But it's
> nevertheless
> > an anecdotal claim, and smarter questions should be asked:
> > * How many people actually read these messages?
> > * Are all the links useful? Do people actually click them?
> > * Could some be removed? Could some be added?
> > * Why is it different in every project? Could at least some parts be
> reused
> > across languages in a robust and properly localizable manner?
> > * Is the talk page really a good place to do this?
> > * How useful is it for people for people who come from another language
> and
> > have an account auto-created?
> >
> > And so on.
> >
> > Welcome templates have been a part of our sites for well over a decade,
> but
> > it's never too late to ask fundamental question about what purpose do
> they
> > serve, and how could this purpose be served better.
> >
> > Happy New Year :)
> >
> > בתאריך 29 בדצמ׳ 2017 11:21,‏ "John E
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

I've usually just don't bother with them, but lately I got complaints about
this specific bot, and the bot operator neglect doing anything with the
problem. That is why I raise the issue, as there are no other forum where
users from one project can make a complaint about misbehaving users on
another project.

Given the response from the bot operator I would say I don't have a good
feeling about this "welcome" at all. It is like those scam emails where you
are greeted in full name. It is creepy…

On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 11:19 AM, Vi to <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I can estimate the number of welcomes I received to roughly 300, most of
> these languages I cannot even copypaste from.
> While these messages are useless for sure I don't see any reason to be
> bothered of them.
>
> Vito
>
> 2017-12-29 10:25 GMT+01:00 K. Peachey <p858sn...@gmail.com>:
>
> > Have you asked the user how the finding the users?
> > Have you considered other steps than just jumping to mailing list?
> > Where are the complaints from the other users to show this is a long
> > running issue?
> >
> > On 29 December 2017 at 19:20, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Users on other projects are complaining about the welcome messages at
> > > arwiki. A bot at that project are welcoming people that has no activity
> > at
> > > that project at all. The bot operator claims the activity is valid,
> but I
> > > can't see that this is a well-behaving bot at all.[1]
> > >
> > > I suspect the bot is welcoming every user it can find, but using user
> > > accounts from central login and not users that has local contributions
> at
> > > arwiki.
> > >
> > > Can someone shut down the bot until the user fix the spam problem.
> > >
> > > [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Meno25#Welcome_messages
> > > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

Link on my email.

On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 10:25 AM, K. Peachey <p858sn...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Have you asked the user how the finding the users?
> Have you considered other steps than just jumping to mailing list?
> Where are the complaints from the other users to show this is a long
> running issue?
>
> On 29 December 2017 at 19:20, John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Users on other projects are complaining about the welcome messages at
> > arwiki. A bot at that project are welcoming people that has no activity
> at
> > that project at all. The bot operator claims the activity is valid, but I
> > can't see that this is a well-behaving bot at all.[1]
> >
> > I suspect the bot is welcoming every user it can find, but using user
> > accounts from central login and not users that has local contributions at
> > arwiki.
> >
> > Can someone shut down the bot until the user fix the spam problem.
> >
> > [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Meno25#Welcome_messages
> > ___
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[Wikimedia-l] Welcome messages at arwiki

[John Erling Blad]

Users on other projects are complaining about the welcome messages at
arwiki. A bot at that project are welcoming people that has no activity at
that project at all. The bot operator claims the activity is valid, but I
can't see that this is a well-behaving bot at all.[1]

I suspect the bot is welcoming every user it can find, but using user
accounts from central login and not users that has local contributions at
arwiki.

Can someone shut down the bot until the user fix the spam problem.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Meno25#Welcome_messages
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